Projects

Last year, I joined TEDXPurdueU as a member of the design team. Helping with organizing an entirely virtual yet engaging TED talk experience was a challenge for everybody involved, to say the least. Although this was only was my first year, I can guess that Zoom meetings with the team at Purdue to plan COVID safe salons (social events), securing an online platform for the main event, and collecting and finalizing TED talk recordings from speakers across the world yielded more stress than a traditional in-person experience would.

I didn't really mind the online setting too much since the work I ended up doing, including this project, was probably pretty similar to the work I would have done if the event was in-person (with the exception of creating illustrations for the speakers' videos). Around October, the design lead showed me posters created by the organizers of TEDXCambridge and TEDXRutgers, which both featured a standing "X" block letter dynamically decorated with symbols representing the city/school. She asked me if I wanted to create something similar for Purdue. I enthusiastically agreed, and the project began!

I started by drawing out the "X" shape on Procreate (the easiest part). After making a short list of things I could incorporate in the design, I scavenged Pinterest for more ideas, taking note of symbols, landmarks, and patterns that were in any way affiliated with the university or even West Lafayette. Incorporating it all visually onto the "X" was definitely not something that could be done in one night- in my case, it took the remainder of the semester to go through a process of thinking, arranging, thinking again, and revising to get to this stage:

It was an evidently incomplete draft (peep the screaming blank space above the archway). And even though I put a lot of thought into all of the symbols and their positioning on the "X", some of the ideas present here didn't even make the cut for the final design. Once finals week ended and winter break started, I realized there was no point in continuing aimlessly brainstorming; now that I had more free time than I ever did in the last four months, the best thing I could do is start drawing and allow for the tentative design to evolve as I did so.

I started with drawing the moon, stars, and astronaut (which was hypothetically Neil Armstrong gravitating towards the American Flag he and Buzz Aldrin planted). Then, I solidified the engineering fountain idea and included a bare tree with snow falling and covering its limbs because Indiana is the first place I saw snow fall. I looked up the Purdue airport and tried to more accurately copy the design over to where I drafted it out, and added a more realistic plane taking off.

As I mentioned, some things had to be replaced. The "grinding student" bit was an idea I ultimately kept, but when I tried to trace the engineering blueprint I found on Pinterest, it appeared too messy and visually unappealing. I dug through my old Calc 3 notes and found that the little drawings I did to accommodate my surface integral homework problems would provide appropriate visual variety for the student's whiteboard. Additionally, the student could now be me :D

Nearly all the monuments lined down the bottom right of the "X" had to leave the scene; I did not want a chaotic bucket of anything and everything related to Purdue if it was not cohesive. I moved the Purdue P statue to the center to tie together the whole design and divide the path that snaked around the X into a pathway and train tracks, rather than allow the bell tower to do that. I replaced the rest of the monuments with a facade from the Windsor Building since it inarguably has the most stunning architecture. I actually wanted to draw the face that looks over Third Street since that's what I saw every time I went to the dining court, but I didn't realize I was drawing a different one until I was almost done. Regardless, I like how it turned out.

Having little cornfields on both sides of the archway was a lot, even for Indiana. After drawing in the archway, I decided to keep the corn on the left and replace the corn on the right with the Purdue drum, which contrary to popular belief, is not actually the world's largest drum. Additionally, as the final design with a forward facing Boilermaker Express train started to actualize, I revised the placement of the starships and biking student to comply with the rest of the design and and added a walking and skateboarding student to occupy empty space. For lack of complexity, I made these students, as well as the ones crossing under the archway, silhouettes.

The bell tower was not difficult to draw, but I was afraid for the space under it. My rough draft sustained me for a majority of the "X", but now I felt like I had to start at square one again and brainstorm an idea from scratch for this part. I had originally wanted to include the facades from the front of the Windsor building here, but I could not justify devoting such a large part of the design to just one building I found pretty. I finally decided on incorporating student athletes to obscure the awkward space between the base of the bell tower and the top of the archway. I looked up past Purdue athletes and chose four that I could successfully arrange together. I changed or added a jersey number so the numbers were in the order 1, 8, 6, and 9, since Purdue was founded in 1869. It's an easter egg that I don't think anybody caught.

There was still empty space everywhere. My goal was for the final design to be busy but not too busy, so I continued to carefully add in little symbols. I added the water tank, standing erect from the cornfields. I also added a tree behind the bell tower with a bike in the leaves, which is a kind of sad but mostly funny reality that students often face when they don't lock their bikes. To the right of the athletes, I added two students working together on a laptop, the Mad Mushroom logo, a den pop, a half eaten insomnia cookie, and the patterns found on a computer chip (this all just reminds me of doing homework on campus). I put a brick wall pattern on the inside of the bottom right of the "X" and of the left of the Windsor facade, since every Purdue building is made of bricks. I added footprints on the top of the "X" leading to the moon, a small Purdue Pete in the corner of the whiteboard, a subtle, cursive "#btfu" underneath the engineering fountain, a BIG 10 logo underneath the archway on the left, and a Purdue Engineering logo underneath the archway on the right, all to take up empty space. Lastly, I added a small rocket taking off to the left of the Purdue P statue in the center, and an outline of the state of Indiana with a little heart where West Lafayette is, because home is where the heart is (I've literally done more school from home than on campus now so idk what I'm saying).

After a couple productive weeks of winter break, I was done. I love how it turned out, and I wish I had taken more screenshots of my design process! We decided to put the design on sweatshirts to give to people in TEDX, but the printing company said there were a couple copyright issues. It wasn't a huge deal; I had to replace/alter four things in the design and we were good to go. Can you spot them?

Thanks for reading through this! I doubt anybody made it this far lmao