Jason Walker – Creative Direction, Design, Illustration

I believe that Graphic Design is first and foremost, a discipline concerned with mass communication. Post-Modernism challenges this, with it’s rejection of absolutes and it’s reverence for the individual’s ability to project truth and meaning onto the artifact, rather than recognize and measure the intent behind the work. To this end, almost anything can be justified as good, or rejected as bad. To accept this point of view is to accept that we as mass communicators have no real value to offer the mass audience. I reject this. I believe that we can make choices in design that resonate with large portions of the mass audience if we learn to manipulate the semantic expressed through the elements of design. I set out to prove this. I used “Gun Control” as a source of content, but kept the thesis focused on the necessity of mass communication to hold itself accountable to the three components of communication theory, semantics, syntax and pragmatics.  Manipulating the elements of line, shape, color, texture, value and space, I created a gradient of highly agitative to soothing and then back to agitating compositions. In the end, despite 4 years of clashes with the faculty, I was told that I’d set a new standard for graphic design at Georgia Southern.