Humanish: the Class of 2025 exhibition
Design
- Brand identity
- Poster and social
- Photo treatment
For
- CCA Interaction Design
- Class of 2025
The brief
Human, with a little bit of machine.
By our senior year, AI had gone from a headline to something we used every day. Our class wanted the show to say something about that moment: that the future still needs human designers, people who can harness the power of technology instead of being replaced by it.
That became the name. Humanish: human, with a little bit of machine in it. My job was to make that feel like something you could see.
The idea
Seen the way a machine sees us.
When AI looks at a camera feed, it draws a box around each person and attaches a label. I borrowed that exact gesture: every senior gets their own box, tagged with their first name. It is the most literal picture of being seen by a machine, and it is also just a class photo.
The reference: a detection model boxing and labeling a camera feed, from my Wahaj tests.
Exploration
Lots of directions before the frame.
Before landing on the detection frame, I pushed the name in a lot of directions: big stacked type, neon yellow, pink serif lists of names, a chat bubble, a black poster. Read left to right, top to bottom, it is roughly the order in which they happened, ending with the first layout that used the frames.
The shoot
Twenty-one portraits, one treatment.
We all took portraits against the same gray wall, each of us striking a pose. Then I edited every one: cut out, black and white, halftoned and grainy like a CCTV feed, until twenty-one different photos read as one image.
Before and after: the raw portraits, and the same class as one halftoned crowd.
The poster
Every face, boxed and labeled.
The frames go over the crowd, each with a name tag in its own color. The wordmark does the same thing in type: a plain, confident sans for "Human", then a soft italic serif for "ish", sitting inside its own detection box.
Across formats
One system, from phone screens to banners.
I applied the system across digital and print: stories, the email announcement and two banners that hung across the show space. The show details move around, but the faces and the frames stay constant.
At the show
Bingo cards and big faces.
To get people through every project, we made a bingo card: one square per senior, and visitors got each designer to sign theirs. One small scribble for you, one giant ego boost for us. The posters went up around campus in the weeks before.
