sugardew.com:design

Why do I do design? Part of it is because sometimes I feel so overhwlemed and elated by the richness of visual experience in the world that I want to explode. The other part remains mysterious. Whatever it is, here is a mishmash of some of my design work. Clicking on a thumbnail will open up a box with more info. Clicking anywhere outside the box will make it go away.

Thanks for looking and please feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested in having me do work for you, or if you just want to say hi!

client | Kathleen Zhang, CPA
work | logo design, site design, XHTML, CSS

Mrs. Zhang was looking for a web design that was simple, pure, and user-friendly. For the logo, I started with a sailboat image that her young daughter drew. For the site design, the waves theme reflects her company slogan, "Navigating to success." A very basic, no fuss website.

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2006
client | Tufts University Anthropology Department
work | site design, site maintenance, XHTML, CSS, Flash 8

The project was a top-to-down redesign of the entire Tufts Anthropology website, which was out of date and still running on HTML 1.0. It took 2 semesters of work, where I worked closely with the deparment head to make sure all the info was correct and the look was exactly how they wanted. We also incorporated a little Flash side show on the main page to show off the work of professors and students.

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client | just me
work | site design, illustration, XHTML, CSS

One summer, a friend and I started a mini-business that was essentially a paper florist shop. I designed a website for it, but at the end of the summer, school took over our lives so the venture closed shop. I still adore the layout though, so it gets to be memorialized here. Hand-illustrated in Photoshop and on paper.

client | just me ('twas a term project)
work | copious research & writing, XHTML, CSS

Sophomore year, I took a course called "Multimedia and the Arts"; the final project called for a fully researched topic presented in web form. This was my project - the topic is the great photography/reality debate. I chose a subtle, colorless layout to pay tribute to photo's black and white origins. Also, I felt that a nice quiet layout would help the content pop more. Skills perfected: wheedling for permission to (fairly) use tons of copyrighted images.

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client | 6.370 Robocraft: MIT Programming Competition 2006
work | web design, XHTML, CSS, a touch of Javascript

Robocraft is an MIT programming competition where teams of students write AI code to control a bunch of robot sprites in a tournament-style 2D game, e.g. capture the flag. Every year, they put up a snazzy new web design to attract participants. I scanned some graphics from last year, played with it, and ended up with this. The organizers approved of its slick, futuristic, sci-fi feel. Since then, the competition's been renamed Battlecode to dispel notions that it's a robot-building contest and a new layout was designed. (I thought it would be better named Fairy Pixie Dragon Knight Battle Adventure Quest, but they didn't agree.)

client | The Community Language Bank of Somerville
work | logo design, web design, XHTML, CSS, touch o' Javascript

I designed this layout for a business whose goal was to link up non-English-speaking community members who needed simple, cheap translation services with local bilingual Tufts University students. The visual concept that we decided on was a bridge, with English characters on one side and foreign characters on the other. Again, I went for the simple and clean. I also designed the interface for members/translators area. The main page features a simple Javascript slideshow showing scenes from Somerville, MA.

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client | Tufts Anthropology Collective
work | web design, XHTML, CSS, site maintenance

The Anthropology Collective is a student-run club at Tufts. I started out with the club's slogan, "We're watching you," and devised this detective-office-desk-like affair. The images used were a mix of stock and personal photography. Challenges surmounted included meeting a turnaround deadline of 48 hours. Aiyah.

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client | just me
work | web design, illustration, XHTML, CSS, tad PHP templating

This is just a little blog layout for my cooking blog. The good thing about being your own client is that you are your own client. I went for a cheerful, playful look lightly inspired by 60s kitchen colors (gotta love the butter yellow). I also wanted the menu on the right to look like a laminated one-pager diner menu. (Ha. Ha.) But instead of dirtying the design up to look truly retro, I chose vector graphics to bring it more up-to-date with its internet-era purpose: blogging.

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client | DemiDec Resources
work | logo design (Macromedia Freehand)

Scholar's Cup is an academic competition started by my friend Dan of Demidec Resources. We wanted to preserve association with Demidec, whose mascot and logo is an alpaca. Hence the fuzzy animal popping out of the book. And the sun and book are of course symbolic of the light and hope of learning. The logo is used on promotional materials and the Scholar's Cup website.

client | n/a (schoolwork)
work | advertisement, photo touch-up

The assignment was to work with the given copy to produce a magazine ad. (You can click on the image above to see the bigger version and read the copy.) The aesthetic had to be "slick and luscious" as it is a luxury car ad, but I wanted to avoid cliches like close-up shots of the car's sleek curves. I based my concept instead on a huge stack of manila folders, to mirror the copy's cheeky voice by poking fun at the nature of office life.

client | none (schoolwork)
work | logo, stationary, and airplane graphics design

I am including this darn thing for the mere reason that it was a huge school assignment that consumed 3 months of my life. And yes, it's a fake company. In the logo, I used the shape of the A to convey flight. The seagull is reminiscent of Boston harbors, over which all planes departing Logan Airport briefly circle. Aerial swooshy lines throughout reinforce the notion of flight. Other elements included in this project were a stewardess uniform, airline counter + kiosk, in-flight meal ware, ticket envelopes, luggage tags, etc. Whew. Now I know why they put whole teams on "corporate identity" projects.

client | none (schoolwork)
work | package design

One day the graphic design teacher brought in this old, tattered paperclip box from her desk and said that it was one of the worst-designed packages she has ever seen. So of course we had to redesign it. Keeping all the original text and info on the box, I ran with the idea of a "jumbo paperclip" to create an illustration that shows the paperclip in a semi-monumental perspective. I also worked with the color constraints of 2 colors - red and black. The design relies on the universality of the paperclip shape - the word "paperclip" is not needed to show what's in the box.

client | just me
work | illustration and writing

This is a simple children's story about a boy, Morris, who always tired out his parents with his well-honed mess-making capabilities. They retaliated by buying him a kitten. Caring for the kitten eventually teaches Morris responsibility. Written and illustrated (using colored pencils) by me.

download story in PDF

client | just me
work | illustration, writing

Written in a night and illustrated in Macromedia Freehand, this is a children's book that teaches about color schemes. It is set on the planet of Achromia, a drab world without color. The main character saves it from perpetual ennui with the help of a magical color wheel. Tee hee.

download story in PDF

client | just me/school
work | illustration

For a term project, I chose to design and illustrate a set of four stamps in tribute to that remarkable life-giving beverage, tea. Each stamp honors a facet of tea-drinking culture: the formality and elegance of Japanese tea ceremony, the indispensible, daily casual breakfast tea, ornately appointed and sociable English afternoon tea, and of course centuries of Chinese tradition - China being the origin of tea. Illustrated using Macromedia Freehand, all in vectors. (The toast took forever. =D)

client | just me/school
work | illustration, cd cover design

This project called for a redesign of a favorite cd using a physical (non-digital) method. The cd is "Plans," by the Indie pop band Death Cab for Cutie. I assembled the illustration from unrecognizable hand-torn magazine images. The imagery suggests the wistful longing for truth and love that runs as a theme throughout the album. The torn bits of glossies also serve as a metaphor for the inevitable disintegration of beauty and perfection, another common theme in Ben Gibbard's work. Text and touchups were applied in Photoshop.

client | Young Entrepreneurs of Tufts
work | illustration, poster design

I created this for the annual winter craft fair sponsored by the student-run entrepreneurship club at my university. Dimensions were tabloid size 11x16. Hand-drawn and colored with ink pen, Prismacolor marker and colored pencil. The Art-Nouveau-style stained glass window is symbolic of the beauty and charm of the handmade, while the tracery depicts the tools of the amateur crafter. The outdoor scene honors both knitters and the spirit of the season, without religious overtimes. (Although the fair was counting a lot on "holiday spirit" for financial success.) Finally, the innocent, naive storybook aesthetic suggests a nostalgia for idealized times, before our era of mass-machined factory-mades.

client | just me
work | illustration, book cover design

For a mini-project, I illustrated and put together this cover for a short story called "European Night Journey." The story is a tribute to that sincere, deep, life-changing bond that is sometimes forged between strangers who will probably never see eachother again. The left shows a young woman in turmoil and her long-distance bus seat neighbor, an elderly gentleman. The right shows the result of their encounter - she at peace and he rewarded by friendship. The image was drawn in Photoshop using a pen table, then edited with filters to achieve a slight sense of surreality.

client | just me/school
work | illustration

I love to cook, so when the professor assigned "visual process illustration," thoughts went instantly to the problem of how to represent a recipe without any words. The end result is this - an illustrated guide on how to make your own Chinese dumplings. Part of the challenge was using a visual vocabulary that was as universal and simple as possible. If nothing else, doing this has given me a healthy respect for the complexity of and specificity required in successful culinary endeavors, which this chart can only hope to approximate. =) Done in Macromedia Freehand.