Congratulations to Art and Design faculty members Thomas Starr and Pedro Cruz for having their work featured in Communication Arts magazine, a professional journal for those involved in creativity in visual communications. The poster that Starr and Cruz designed for last year’s Indexical Design Symposium, presented by the MFA in Information Design and Visualization program, was selected out of thousands of entries for inclusion in the magazine’s 2017 Annual Typography Competition. Read more about the jurors and selection process here.

Tom Starr

Pedro Cruz

“The Indexical Design Symposium explored the physical trace and its role as an expression of evidence, so in this poster, we conveyed indexicality—the causal connection between an object and its effects in the real world—by rendering the title indirectly, as a trace of itself, showing only evidence of its existence,” explained Starr and Cruz. “We made the poster letterforms physical by generating them as stencils that were then overlaid on cyanotype paper and exposed to the sun.”

With the largest international circulation of any trade journal on visual communications, having work selected for Communication Arts magazine’s Annual Typography Competition is considered a significant professional milestone, so a sincere congratulations to the poster’s designers Starr and Cruz, as well as Dietmar Offenhuber, the poster’s art director, and Nathan Felde, the poster’s writer.

More than 30,000 copies of the issue will be distributed to subscribers and by single copy sales through art stores, book stores and Amazon.com. Check out the all of this year’s winners in the poster category here.