It’s tough writing music when you hate the sound of your voice. That didn’t stop me. My earliest creative experiences were as a songwriter, starting off with nonsensical songs that tried way too hard to be funny, leading into overly dramatic ones that tried way too hard to be serious and meaningful. The pivotal moments that stuck with me from this phase of my life were learning how to improvise on and compose for piano, and learning the basics of audio recording and production.

I distinctly remember declaring that I wanted to become a filmmaker. I don’t know what compelled me, but maybe I was inspired by the onslaught of Flash animations and YouTube sketches at the time. For a few years, I tried to watch a classic movie everyday to see what I could learn. That passion drove me to create my own absolutely terrible YouTube videos, culminating in a stop motion animation that earned me a nomination (not a win) at a Tribeca award for young filmmakers. Looking back, I think losing that award really stung, and might’ve been the reason why I stopped making movies.

My real passion — which continues to be my secret real passion — was for video games. I absolutely loved video games, particularly Nintendo and Flash games, but I never considered game development as a possible career path. Even so, I discovered that I could make my own using a sort of “coding” language called Scratch that MIT developed to teach kids code. So, with my extremely limited capabilities for thinking about computer science logic and algorithms, I became some lesser definition of a game developer.

College was the first place I encountered a seemingly endless demand for graphic designers. I had picked up some basic skills in high school by making games and album covers. It was enough experience that people in college frequently asked me to make posters for them. But I didn’t know what made a good poster at the time, so I thought “good” design was complicated design, and I essentially tried to do as much as possible with every single project.

Really, my heart was in audio. My background in writing and producing music led to a couple of live audio gigs on student productions, which quickly led to my entire shtick as a theater major. Serving on the board of our student theater company, I was essentially the campus’ resident sound designer — a title I had to grow into, since I was certainly not the most experienced composer or engineer in school. But I stuck with it, even going as far as to make a thesis in theatrical sound design.

I was also a computer science major. But of the courses I took in college, really only one or two actually helped me become a coder. The rest were far too advanced for my interests — things like automata theory, lambda calculus, and discrete mathematics that had me flabbergasted. It wasn’t until my last year in school that I realized I could use code in creative ways, and by that point I was fully committed to theater anyway.

The funny thing is that I desperately wanted to become a playwright. Except, I could never get into a playwriting course for one reason or another. In lieu of that, I pursued administrative theater internships during the summers thinking that would bring me closer to my dream. What really happened, though, is that these small non-profits just wanted me for my design experience. Once that was abundantly clear, I did my best to make the most of these opportunities. I took on far more responsibilities than I was paid for so that I could teach myself new skills and develop a portfolio.

My first summer at Williamstown was brutal. I worked for three months straight, leading a team of two other designers basically the same ages as me, taking only three days off the entire summer (weekends were workdays!). It was not unlike hazing. What I got out of it, though, was the ability to produce high-quality work under extreme conditions, and my first major freelance client. I would go on to work with Williamstown for several years, producing designs for their following galas and seasons.

One of my coworkers at Williamstown ended up at a contemporary, experimental NYC-based synagogue named Lab/Shul. They had a freelance graphic designer drop out at the last minute, so she thought of me to replace them. That first job led to a multi-year relationship with the company, which included designing the identities for their flagship High Holy Days celebrations.

From one synagogue to another I suppose! Central Synagogue saw my work for Lab/Shul and reached out to me for their first-ever virtual High Holy Days (a COVID byproduct). That led to a year full of collaborations spanning across publications, mailings, and microsites.

At this point, my specialities had become branding, motion, and small-scale websites that I primarily built using site building platforms. I worked with a variety of other clients with the odd job here and there, whether I was creating a visual identity, an animated logo, or a landing page.

In truth, I never felt like I was succeeding even in my modest success. Instead, I was constantly stressed, unable to predict how long a project would take. I didn’t have any formal education in design, and I found myself struggling to understand what led to a “good” design and how I could reliably make successful design decisions. I found myself neglecting my hobbies, but I still managed to compose a song every now and then. At some point, I just decided to release this unfinished music all at once.

Doug’s course covered basically everything I needed to know for my entire time at RISD. By learning how different design aesthetics and practices emerged, I found myself able to analyze existing designs and make informed decisions in my own work. Besides listening to lectures, Doug had us learn by assigning projects that engaged with historical and contemporary references and figures.

Tom’s approach to form was particularly cinematic and photographic. He had us working with our hands and with cameras, discovering form from real, physical objects instead of crafting it out of nothing. At first, I found this exceedingly difficult because we were designing without content to design for. But what Tom helped me realize was that there were formal aspects of design that made an image or composition compelling even without content to rely on.

Nancy’s approach to typography was expressive and experimental. Tom was her husband, and the two of them had a long and impressive career creating poster designs together, with Tom primarily managing form and Nancy in charge of type. Nancy had us thinking deeply about the aesthetic qualities of letterforms, and then thinking about ways to create compositions out of just letters or combining type with image. We practiced these concepts through a series of exercises that culminated in a “process” zine showcasing our best outputs.

Anther’s course was a good foil to Doug’s, in this case focusing more on contemporary theories and practices for graphic design than on historical examples. We read and discussed theories leading to (and then reacting to) Modernism, and then created work that had us dissecting what these big concepts meant to us. This was the first time I really questioned what “graphic design” was, which felt like an essential step toward finding my own creative voice.

I went to grad school in part to become a teacher, and Nancy’s course was the first in a concentration on collegiate teaching. Her seminar was extremely practical and involved creating a teaching portfolio. That meant writing a teaching philosophy, diversity statement, several course descriptions, and a syllabus. This was my first time ever creating these kinds of materials, which was challenging in part because I didn’t feel qualified to do so yet. But even so, this work served as the foundation of what I taught later on at RISD.

Mark taught a primer in the Max visual programming language that covered both generative audio and video using MSP and Jitter. If you’re confused, just know that Max is basically an app that lets you plug sounds, images, and code together to see what comes out. I thought that this kind of process could be useful in my work, but discovered that our focus was primarily on experimentation and artistic output rather than on communication. That helped me realize I was in the right department — I wanted to be a designer, not an artist.

Olya’s course, which felt like my first real “graduate” course, followed in the footsteps of a syllabus written by Cem Eskinazi. Unlike Graduate Form I, which was about image and composition, Graduate Form II was about process. We had assignments that required us to do things like analyze work we liked, experiment with a tool for an extended period of time, set up conditional design scenarios, and develop a consistent design regimen.

Lucy guided us through several “real world” projects including the design for a magazine editorial, a music festival identity, and a full-length book. These prompts put an increased focus on craft, both in our designs but also in the physical production of our work. The challenge therein was finding how to insert our own voices into highly-polished outputs that fit specific formal requirements.

Another class with Doug! This time, Doug had us create physical models spanning a series of exhibition scenarios. Even so, the emphasis was less on creating elaborate models and more on crafting unique experiences for potential audiences. This was particularly challenging for me because I felt more comfortable with software than with my hands. What I learned was that working physically brings you one step closer to the actual experience of someone walking through your exhibition.

Cyrus’ approach to type design focused on the rhythm created in and between the positive and negative spaces of letters. We went through a series of drawing exercises, building our own pens and looking closely at what gives a letterform its distinct voice and character. After that, we designed our first ever fonts — specifically, pixel fonts, made up of square units. Finally, we worked on original “body” fonts designed for typesetting paragraphs of text. I learned that I really enjoyed the process of analyzing pre-existing typefaces to see the secrets of their construction, and then incorporating these ideas with a personal twist in my own font.

Marie was a type designer and coder who worked with Cyrus at his type foundry, Occupant Fonts. Whereas Cyrus taught us what was essentially traditional type design, Marie taught us a more experimental form of typography that involved motion. We created things called “variable” fonts, which you could easily animate on websites. So, we also created digital web specimens for trying out our typefaces. But more than anything else, I learned about the wide range of creative uses for technical skills like type design and coding. After Marie’s course, I would continue to use these skills in virtually every project I made while at RISD.

Working with my supervisor Olivia Crosby, I was involved in three projects, each at different phases of completion. This was extremely convenient because it essentially gave me a crash course on every phase of exhibit design — concept/schematic design, design development, and final design. But unlike the exhibit design course I had just taken the prior semester, I worked exclusively digitally (although there were some physical models in our studio). My responsibilities consisted of fine-tuning slide decks and InDesign files (yes, exhibition design apparently happens in InDesign!), sketching ideas, organizing visual research, and mocking up wall designs on top of renders completed by the in-house 3D team. Besides those three projects, I also collaborated with the Creative Technologist intern Ekemini Nkanta on a prototype for an AR mirror concept.

Bethany and Ramon guided us through research-oriented projects that had us looking at places and objects to find deeper meanings and stories hidden within. Our first project was a collaborative publication about our identities, our unique perspectives, and our roles in the local community. The second project was a deep-dive into a specific artifact from the Providence Public Library. I selected a vintage whist playing board, which inspired me to think about games, rules, and what it means to play something. Additionally, this course marked the first time I began collaborating with my peers, developing websites that helped me sharpen and expand my skills as a coder.

One more course with Doug! Even though this course was the end of the graduate typography curriculum, it covered the fundamentals of typographic terminology, craft, and process. We started with an exercise in rearranging unorganized information into an accessible format, then moved on to typesetting a short book, creating several editorial typographic illustrations, and finally conceiving of a wide-ranging brand identity. Each project started with a practical prompt that emulated “real-world” design work, made even more realistic due to constantly overlapping deadlines.

At the time, RISD did not have a core curriculum in coding. This meant that there were frequently thematic coding courses, like Marie’s from before and Eric’s now, that popped up and offered their own take on an introductory web programming curriculum. Eric’s perspective on coding was much more in line with a traditional computer science regimen, which I found helpful in determining best practices and setting a solid foundation to keep building on. This was the first time that I felt like I actually understood how web code worked, and wasn’t just reusing pre-coded demos to create my own projects.

Aaron’s course exclusively focused on research, with no instruction on user interface design. Our objective was to understand a broad overview of the research that goes into professional user-centric projects. We accomplished this by proposing and completing our own research project over the course of the semester. At the time, I was growing increasingly interested in atypical user experiences, so I used this course as an opportunity to challenge assumptions about the layout of social media sites and propose my own design.

Each semester, RISD offers several four-week workshops that give students an opportunity to learn a specific technical skill. Grad students were occasionally allowed to teach a workshop, so I jumped on the opportunity as a chance to get into teaching. I discovered I was utterly and terribly unprepared to teach, but learned two important lessons: teaching is harder than it looks, especially teaching designers how to code, and; you don’t have to be an expert in a topic to help students learn it. Teaching code actually helped me become a better coder. I was able for the first time to see how sharing my work and studies could help others learn, too.

Ryan’s course let us propose topic we wanted to work on with the support of a weekly meeting. I planned to teach my own variable fonts course in the fall, so this was a chance to develop the materials ahead of time. What initially started as a basic website evolved into a full-fledged type testing tool with a distinctive musical personality. Every week, Ryan pushed my idea further, and it was up to me to figure out what the limits of my ability to code were. I ended up with a significantly more complex project than I thought I was capable of at the start.

This course marked my first time teaching an original semester-long curriculum. The curriculum covered what I considered the gamut of digital design practices: static design, motion design, and web design. Through teaching, I discovered the limits of what I could teach in a given set of time, but was equally amazed at what students could accomplish with just a basic set of tools at their disposal. The real challenges, though, were the weeks in which I had to teach my five-hour class meeting three days in a row. That’s just an impossible thing to prepare for.

Right after teaching my own course, I had to attend a supportive seminar required for all graduates teaching during wintersession. At first, I was frustrated by the requirement, but luckily Mairead recognized our stress levels and used this meeting as an opportunity to work through the challenges we faced during our time teaching. It felt special to be in a room where everyone was a teacher, and I held on to that experience later on when I began developing resources for students and teachers alike.

With two web courses and some experience teaching code under my belt, I felt confident enough to take on some web-based freelance work. I worked with Design Observer to create a sibling site for their upcoming twentieth anniversary, which coincided with an award ceremony. Their team provided me with initial design mockups, which I implemented and expanded upon to include elements of motion and generative design. By the end, I realized that abstract and creative uses of code actually had a practical place and purpose in “traditional” sites like this one.

Lucy and Paul’s course followed in the prior semester’s footsteps and featured open-ended projects about identity, place, and audience — really, about what it means to maintain a creative practice. I found myself struggling even from the first assignment, for which I created something I liked the idea of but couldn’t fully commit to for some reason. In the end, I realized that the project was not consistent with my voice — it was too abstract in a way I simply couldn’t relate to. So, the second project allowed me an opportunity to pivot toward something less abstract and more like me. From thereon, my values as a designer were rooted in accessibility through this lens of direct (and often deliberately educational) communication.

Paul’s seminar focused on discovering our individual approaches to design in preparation for our theses. We spent a vast majority of the semester working on our “thesis compendiums” — books that would essentially function as our thesis proposals. But I had just broken my wrist. So instead of making a book, I went full force on a digital-first approach that reckoned with the ideas of originality and authenticity. I called my web-based book “A Thesis Compendium” to acknowledge that my project was the framework for a book, but not an actual copy of the book itself. Instead, the website generated print-ready PDFs using a wide variety of design parameters.

Techlands was a research-oriented Digital + Media course in which we worked on personal projects that engaged with the environment around us. We conducted field research through several site visits that explored locations in Rhode Island as a means for collecting material and searching for inspiration. One of these endeavors resulted in the content for my first project in Graduate Studio I. Besides that, I continued to create work in the vein of the user experience investigations I had started in prior semesters.

Now in my third type design course at RISD, I worked with Richard on expanding my font Limkin, which I had created in Cyrus’ class. Richard’s approach to type design focused on craft, with roots in hand lettering and some of the more “traditional” aspects of type design. With Richard’s guidance, I designed a sans serif variant of Limkin, as well as hairline and heavyweight versions. And, using lessons from Marie’s course, I was able to turn Limkin into a variable font, which meant that I could interpolate the in-between weights and even use the typeface as a flared, half-serif version. I would go on to use this typeface for many projects, including this thesis!

I wanted to follow in Marie’s footsteps, so I proposed my own workshop that gave students a chance to design variable fonts. Since most of our type design courses focused on craft and precision, I figured mine could focus on experimentation. In the course, I encouraged students to learn the technology, play with it, and see what forms it could result in. And, I was able to incorporate the tool/website that I had created during the winter as the class website and a showcase of student work.

I really enjoyed collaborating with my peers during the previous semester, so I kept that practice going! I designed and developed the website for our graduate biennial, as well as coded three final projects for peers in the grad and undergrad programs. With the first two of these projects, I was learning how to scale up a single design into a larger, generative system. That meant populating the website’s contents from a spreadsheet instead of manually coding every element.

In terms of new work, I continued to create websites incorporating practices and ideas from prior semesters. One of these was a freelance project for a music school, whose website features a fully-functional piano keyboard. I also remade my project Pixel Weaver to incorporate more controls and a new user interface, as well as converted some code from my project Notes from Neither Here nor There into a musical toy of sorts. Lastly, I created a small save-the-date website to invite family members to my wedding!

To formally propose our theses, we had to give short talks on what our research and work would look like for the following year. In my presentation, I talked about organizing my output into a few buckets: type design, education, and studio work. So, I ended up creating a website for my type foundry, which featured all the fonts I had made at RISD so far. After that, I worked on a variety of educational websites aimed at teaching code to designers. Besides those personal projects, I collaborated with my peers on several websites and also made a couple of smaller sites for presenting ideas pertaining to my thesis.

Reuben’s course taught the programming language R in the context of data visualization. I was Reuben’s teaching assistant (but also taking the course). For my final project, I really wanted a challenge of working with “big” data, since that’s what felt special about using R as opposed to simply working out of a spreadsheet. I discovered a massive dataset (more than one billion rows of data) archiving info from the defunct GeoCities community, and I created an interactive digital article collecting my findings.

This course was a prime example of learning through the process of making. Each week, we had a new open-ended assignment and only the week in which to complete it. Therefore, we all ended up with a massive output spanning a wide range of concepts and forms. I used the course as a chance to tackle some projects and techniques that I felt I never had the time for, like a website that played the Animal Crossing soundtrack in real time (a personal love of mine).

For my second time teaching the workshop, I used a new custom-coded website I had developed over the summer. This site featured an in-browser text editor, which I had learned how to implement while making my project Small Sites; Big Stories. In practice, this website proved to be way too complicated and large in scale that I couldn’t maintain it, and I resorted back to using my original workshop website from the year before. That’s the nature of user experience — you don’t know if things will work unless you actually let people try to use them.

I continued to see collaborations as opportunities to focus on technical skills as opposed to design. In my own practice, I was coding individual webpages less frequently and instead finding ways to generate my code off of data from spreadsheets. At the same time, my peers were also moving away from smaller-scale projects and into things like publications that repeated designs across several pieces of content. It turned out that my newfound coding skills were a perfect fit for these kinds of design formats. The one drawback, though, was that I over-volunteered myself and had to eventually drop a project (a type foundry website for recent alums) that I didn't have time to complete.

Teddy and Jessica’s course had us creating trailers and title sequences for our theses as a means for generating new work and figuring out what our theses were really about. At this point, I was fully dedicated to web-based practices and building tools and frameworks instead of complete, final projects. So, I made a variety of websites that could make these projects for me, and then edited screen recordings of my sites for our final critiques.

Even though I had taught two full semesters of coding workshops already, I had never taught a full-semester coding course. For this class, I tried utilizing some of the tools I had made during my first thesis course. These projects featured prebuilt demos and organized resources that encouraged students to code creative outputs at any skill level. But like my experience with the workshop during the fall, I discovered some user experience issues that made teaching difficult. What ended up working was just spending as much one-on-one time as possible with each student to tackle their individual needs.

Working with my friend and peer Rebecca, I had another opportunity to put my graduate research into practice. In this case, I developed the website for a Toronto-based restaurant. While the website mostly features a typical user experience, the homepage incorporates a generative piece of art as a way of making the site stand out without disrupting its accessibility.

Bethany and Pouya guided us to the end of our experiences at RISD. We came up with plans for finishing our theses, and over several weeks I kept adjusting my concept until it arrived at what you’re reading right now. I realized that what would be most helpful for my likely audience was a direct account of what grad school was and what it taught me. I also realized that to do so was not feasible in the time I had, and would not be fun to read in the format of a PDF of a book (as most people would encounter it). So, fully embodying my identity as a web designer, I made my thesis into a website first and a book second.

Bill’s course was a meditation on color theory in the context of gouache painting. Our weekly meetings were structured around color studies, each taking on the same dimensions but focusing on different topics pertaining to color theory. While my thesis endeavors were frantic and stressful, this course was not. As Bill put it on the first day of class, we would move at the same pace that paint moved at — not very fast. By the end of the course, I had a terminology and respect for color in a way I could not articulate beforehand.

The school chose me, along with my friend and peer Emily, to create the identity and website for our grad show. We really wanted the identity to be joyous, colorful, and most importantly to somehow incorporate student work. Using techniques I had picked up from making Pixel Weaver, we discovered that we could generate a field of color by zooming in closely on images of student projects. So, the resulting identity did not have a single color palette, but instead directly referenced the colors used in student work.

My last time teaching as a student! I was treading old ground with the Variable Fonts Workshop. Usually, I used each section as an opportunity to switch things up and try to improve the course. This time, I took the opposite experiment and kept it almost identical each time. I discovered that I was previously overworking myself — the formula was working totally fine already. I also began developing a new version of the class website that made use of my improved coding and design skills.

Why run one company when you can run four? I decided to start a studio called No Replica, which would primarily create websites and generative brand identities. I named it after my undergraduate thesis in theatrical sound design because my work connected technology and experience, which felt like theater to me. I figured the studio would be my one business that made money, and then the other three could serve as personal passions. GD with GD (Graphic Design with Gabriel Drozdov) would host my teaching projects, Too Much Type my fonts, and Barco Loudly my music (a passion I hoped to pick back up!). If nothing else, these “companies” helped me to organize my life since I was entering a world without the structures I had relied on for three years.