The Ivy Film Festival is the largest student-run film festival in the world. Every year, they receive hundreds of film and screenplay submissions from undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. The Festival has also featured prominent and acclaimed speakers such as Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Adrian Brody, and Oliver Stone.

In 2009 and my senior year of college, I was contacted by the festival and asked if I would do them the honor of imagining a visual theme that year’s festival.  Given the popularity of festival as well as my own interest in cinema, I graciously accepted.

After learning that the keynote event to be about the difference between current Hollywood and Hollywood during the golden years, I wanted to pick a theme that could represent both eras. Keeping in mind that the marketing should also be hip, trendy, and attract a college-aged crowd, I decided on a visual campaign inspired by Saul Bass.

Saul Bass is a graphic designer stemming from the fifties who made an influential mark on the visual identity of Hollywood – particularly film title sequences. His style was very minimal yet raw and humorous. Some of his major works include title sequences for Vertigo(1958) and Man with the Golden Arm(1955), yet his work continues into the present day for films like Goodfellas(1991) and Casino(1995). Undoubtedly, his long and consistence presence in Hollywood has inspired many other film visuals such as those for Catch Me If You Can(2002) and Burn After Reading(2008).

I intensely studied Saul Bass’ use of color, typography, and minimalism in order to recreate the feel of his title sequences while creating my designs from scratch. Another interesting concept I tried in some of the posters was to capture the motion of title-sequences in a single shot (see the posters for “Getting it Written” and “Student Film Screenings”).

I met regularly with the festival director and publicity team to make sure they were satisfied with my work. There were definitely times when my design sense would conflict with what they wanted, but we woud also discuss through our problems and pick the solution that would create the most effective advertisement campaign. After weeks of strenuous sketching, designing, and meetings (also in midst of writing my senior thesis), I created a set of 4 posters, a festival t-shirt, and other publicity items for the Ivy Film Festival. I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment when everyone in the festival told me how excited they were with my work and, especially, when I received a personal complement from the CEO of Paramount.

Back in the days when I was a student at Brown, I always used to look forward to reading the Brown Daily Herald. One reason was because my friend, Dustin Foley, had his own daily column called “Enigma Twist.” Enigma Twist was ambitious project to come up with a new type of puzzle every day but somehow he pulled it off for my entire senior year.

Recently, Dustin has decided to make Enigma Twist into its own website. He asked me to help him to make a logo and I was eager to help. When sketching out ideas, I wanted to make something that would embody the attitude of his puzzles. The puzzles were really more about being fun and clever than looking fancy or professional. His puzzles and his website seemed to fit right in with the comic culture that seems to be evolving with today’s youth. Think dinosaur comics or xkcd.  I decided, instead of trying “professionalize” enigma twist, I should embrace this new interesting style.

If Enigma Twist is all about new and clever games, why not turn the logo into a puzzle itself? Here was the result.

The main logo is a simple solvable maze. I wanted to keep the look as do-it-yourself and retro as possible.

In case legibility was a concern, here was an alternate logo that could be used that incorporates the same style.

Also, check out Enigma Twist on Twitter for daily word puzzles.

I spent my entire weekend this week volunteering and sitting in at events for the Brown/RISD joint conference, A Better World by Design and, I have to say, I enjoyed every moment of it. Not often enough have I felt this sense of community where everybody was on the exact same page and here to discuss the same issues.

I love design but I often think about to utility of its service. It is so easy to get lost in the mess of commercial product design and feel that design only perpetuates this colossal consumer culture. Perhaps because I have drowned in this sentiment so often, it was invigorating to hear what inspired people and organizations had to say about what they were doing to help the world – from Project H’s redesign of the Hippo Roller to Ken Banks’ open-source FrontlineSMS project. In addition to specific projects, it was also simple refreshing to see and meet so many professionals and students that felt the same way I did about design and were compelled to change the status quo. It gave me hope for the future of design in our world.

Considering this was only the second year for the conference and many of my classmates were involved in putting it together, I feel very proud of how well it turned out. Congratulations!