Typography II: Informative Poster Project
Medium: Mixed media, Photography, Digital design (AI)
Date: Fall 2025
Medium: Mixed media, Photography, Digital design (AI)
Date: Fall 2025
For this project, we were asked to read Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest and develop a concept based on one of the book’s core themes: Resist, Vote, Love, Teach, or Strike. Initially, I explored ideas rooted in “Resist” and “Strike,” but those concepts felt more like adding fuel to the fire, something that didn’t align with the book’s intent or today’s cultural climate.
My professor encouraged me to consider a personal hobby as a starting point. That suggestion led me to cosplay. What began as hesitation turned into an opportunity to teach, to show how cosplay is meaningful, creative, and fun, even if it’s often labeled as “weird.” The goal became to reframe cosplay as a form of art and self-expression that doesn’t need to be taken too seriously to be valid.
The project plays with the idea that many socially accepted activities are essentially cosplay. Sports fans in full team gear or concertgoers dressing for an event. Using humor to challenge the stereotype that “cosplay is weird.” That phrase ultimately became the central slogan of the project.
I had a friend photograph a few of my cosplays in a studio with a Mylar backdrop I made. Using myself as the subject and speaking from personal experience rather than trying to represent the entire cosplay community.
In the end, the Mylar background wasn’t working, so I replaced it with a grid of vintage comic books. This choice reinforced the theme and better connected the posters conceptually. The grid ultimately became the unified background for the series.
As a final component, the work was installed in a public space, which required learning how to make or source wheat paste and properly apply the posters so they could be viewed “in the wild.” To fully commit to the theme, I installed the work in cosplay, headed into downtown Nashville on a windy 30-degree day dressed as a giant pink cat to put up the posters.
I even shocked my professor by showing up to my final presentation in a full cat costume.
Final Poster Series: “Cosplay Is Weird”
