2024  
Public Memory
Brand Design, Art Direction, Packaging
ballpoint pen ink. artificial citrus lozenge. static clinging to your hair during rush hour. powdery shredded paper and the metallic whir of a copy machine... pairs well with peeling leather boots and seltzer water.
       A fragrance brand inspired by memories of contemporary urban life. Public Memory’s first product is .readme, a perfume with notes of paper, yuzu, and aluminum.
       The fragrance industry typically appeals to the aesthetics of the elite using frilly language and graphics. I wanted to depart from this canon by creating a fragrance with a direct tone that felt utilitarian and reflective of its fragrance notes.
         I conceptualized the brand from the ground-up, designing its wordmark, business card, product label, packaging, and copywriting. I creative directed a photoshoot for the brand in collaboration with photographer and stylist Kyley Sneed.

Photography: Kyley Sneed
Designed in Becca Leffel-Koren’s Branding & Identity course.



2024     Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889–1935
Exhibition Design, Print + Publication, Social Media
Designed during an internship with HOUR Studio, Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889–1935 is a multilingual exhibition, publication, and workshop series that celebrates the work of immigrant artists and reformers at Chicago’s historic Hull-House Museum.    
       I assisted in design across all phases of the project, including the publication, exhibition graphics, print and digital promotional materials, and exhibition takeaways.
Client: Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Agency: HOUR Studio
Design team: Mollie Edgar & Toby Albright
Publication photography: Nico Gardner

2025 Society of Typographic Arts Winner
AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2024 Winner

2024
  Spiral Jetty
Visual Identity
A visual identity system for Spiral Jetty, a land artwork by Robert Smithson. I focused on the work’s erosion across time and space, which informed the wordmark’s typeface and variable weight shifts. Bodies of text are pushed to and exceed beyond frame edges to emulate the dispersal of the landmark itself.
           Considering Spiral Jetty’s remote location, most people understand the work through the lens of its often black and white documentation. Spiral Jetty’s identity system employs a monochromatic color scheme for this reason.
           Perforation marks on the business card and poster offer a tactile element that mirror the work’s textural and dispersive qualities.
Designed in Becca Leffel-Koren’s Branding & Identity course.

2024
 Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917–1967 & The Spaces We Call Home
Exhibition Design
Edgar Miller: Anti-Modern, 1917–1967 and The Spaces We Call Home were two concurrent bilingual exhibitions at Chicago’s Depaul Art Museum. Both exhibitions celebrated multi-hyphenate creative practitioners based in or with strong ties to Chicago, all of which value public art, craftsmanship, and collaboration.
           I assisted in the design, production preparation, and typesetting of wall graphics, as well as social media assets and collateral.    
Client: Depaul Art Museum
Agency: HOUR Studio
Design team: Mollie Edgar & Tobey Albright

2024     Sound Bubble
Exhibition Design, Copywriting, Curation
In this project, I took on the role of exhibition curator and selected works by the following international artists: Nelo Akamatsu, Paul Kos, Dorette Sturm, Nicola Giannini, and Jonathon Kirk and Lee Weisert. Each artwork is an installation that foregrounds the sensory experiences of water with emphases on touch and sound. Because of the deprioritization of sight in these works, I incorporated braille into this exhibition identity system.
           I began by designing a multiscriptual wordmark pictured above. I was fascinated by braille’s modular dot system and chose to interweave the corresponding English glyphs throughout it. The wordmark is designed to change form depending on the context, while always remaining in a similar grid-like structure.
           I chose to render the title wall and posters in translucent acrylic to both allude to water and emphasize the exhibition’s understatement of visuals. The title wall features introductory text in both English and braille while keeping in mind braille formatting and ADA-compliant wall placement.
           The promotional posters may stand alone or be viewed side-by-side to form a fully engraved image of Chozumaki by Nelo Akamatsu. The engraving is comprised of small dots, encouraging viewers to engage with the posters through touch.
Designed in Becca Leffel-Koren’s Multilingual Typography course.

2024    
Sidelined
Publication
Elfriede Jelinek’s 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature speech, “Sidelined,” addresses Jelinek’s belief that language is unable to fully encapsulate the truth of human existence. Her writing style is unpolished, rambly, and at times surrealist, often turning to hair as a metaphor for her frustrations with writing.
           I altered the primary images in the book into ASCII art and incorporated sheets of vellum as a means of literalizing language’s abstraction of reality. Both ASCII art and vellum obscure details of the visual content at hand. The use of prong fastener binding, varied column width, and a monospace typeface further emphasizes Jelinek’s diaristic, stream-of-consciousness tone.
           Jelinek’s poem “Contempt” is incorporated into the book via an orange vellum bookmark that fits into the spaces between spread columns as a reflection of its similarly pessimistic tone to the primary text, “Sidelined.” Her more compassionate poem, “Love,” is incorporated through the tail end of the book on vellum sheets that gradually envelop the cynical voice of “Sidelined” positioned underneath.
Designed in Amy Auman and Rachel Silverberg’s Typography II course.


©2025 Fiona Lyons-Carlson
Updated December 2025