Micah Micah RISD RISD

As a graphic designer I’ve been used to my role of organizer and image maker. I’m given content and it’s been my job to organize that content in a way that makes it more functional and aesthetically interesting. Lately I’ve been given prompts that give me the ability to tell a story, to be in control of the content itself. Being told to “do something typographic about plants” is incredibly wide open, and with only 3 weeks it’s not a lot of time to do something coherent with a subject I’m not an expert in. After some deliberation I decided I wanted to explore the use of genetics in industrial farming. Due to the tight timeline I decided to focus on corn, America’s largest crop. Tons of research and then building that research into coherent, easy to understand story is incredibly challenging and rewarding. Inspiration for the aesthetic language came from industrial machinery of the American mid-west of the middle of the 20th century. I wanted to bridge the gap between mid-century Americana and the new confusing world of genetics to create something approachable and digestible. Food production in America is a hot topic right now as the country looks at conserving resources and focusing on sustainability. Food production is also an incredibly complicated labyrinth of secrecy and what little information that is available is scattered across a variety of sources. It will be up to designers to take that information and distill it down into something that can be understood by consumers.