At the end of each spring semester, RISD hosts a Graduate Thesis Exhibition that presents fine art and design work by approximately 235 students completing master’s degrees in the 16 graduate departments. As part of the exhibition, graduate graphic design students are commissioned to design and execute a graphic identity for the show.
This year, Cem Eskinazi and Mary Yang — both RISD Graphic Design MFA ’17 — collaborated to design a graphic system that represents the graduate student body’s work. They explain that the graduate student body at RISD is extremely diverse in terms of interest, practice and visual style, so to construct a coherent landscape they created an identity that is hyper-adaptive in nature based on a modular and scalable system. The identity had been celebrated at the institution and in the broader design community. Eskinazi, by the way, was selected earlier this year as a GDUSA Student To Watch.