Website Design 2025 Client Rhode Island School of Design
In collaboration with Tina Zhou and Lucy Pham, and utilizing an established design and branding visual language, I worked on designing the RISD Graphic Design Bienniel web platform. We aimed to establish a strong conceptual relationship between the logic of the identity and the interaction features of the site.
The For Reference Only website can be viewed here.
Curaturial Statement
We spend hours designing books, posters, websites, and experimental projects—only to wonder: What happens once they’re out in the world? Are they merely skimmed, briefly glanced at, or ever truly engaged with? Do they exist beyond the scroll of the Instagram feed?
As graphic designers we combine form, apply fancy treatments to images, and carefully select a typeface that draws your eye. But will this typeface, agonizingly optimized for readability, ever experience the satisfaction of being truly read? Or is it doomed to simply be bookmarked, archived, and repurposed as reference material for yet another design destined for the same fate? Is the pleasure of aesthetics really that preoccupying?
✱ On the surface, graphic aesthetics may seem more about a vibe than meaning. Yes, we design to make you look—but we’re more than just a pretty typeface. “For reference only” is a provocation—to look beyond the surface, to read the subtext of everything that makes up graphic design. We invite the second glance, the pause, the time to see.
Below is the designed identity system for the show.
