World of Cnidaria -
Undergraduate Senior Thesis
Over the course of my senior year of undergrad at Drexel University, I embarked on a journey to understand my personal design inspiration and establish a practice that would carry on in my professional career. This would become the World of Cnidaria: a collection of artifacts uncovered through intuitive play with lighting design.
The journey began with world-building to capture the abstract feeling of mystery and intrigue. Inspired by the great cryptic texts such as the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus, I sought to capture the feeling of childlike wonder in the 2-dimensional world before moving on to the 3-dimensional.
The final product is a collection of lamps inspired at first by the whimsy of the World of Cnidaria, and later by the mysterious objects of our own world - nature, technology, and architecture. Some lamps are purely incidental exercises in rapid prototyping, while others followed a traditional path from ideation through production at scale.
A custom, variable weight typeface of my language, PLONK, was designed by Ian Griffin for this project.
Using world-building as a creative starting point, I set off to uncover the mysteries of the World of Cnidaria through language, illustration, and design.
Transitioning from world-building to a final collection.
