Graduates

Alex Suppan

MFA in Graphic Design - 3 Yr Path — Graduate Graphic Design
Course:
Graduate Typography 3
Faculty:
Gloria Kondrup
Term:
2024 Fall

Tumblr Girls

I've always been fascinated by Tumblr in the kind of way people love the music they listened to in high school. When I was prompted to imagine up an exhibition of anything, I chose Tumblr. Because I felt like it, of course, but soon enough I realized the value in documenting it. There's no sense of urgency to preserve digital culture, let alone treat the interests of teenage girls with any sense of seriousness. I decided to do both, before Tumblr effectively disappears from the internet like MySpace did.

This project argues for the treating of teenage internet culture as something worth preserving. There is no comprehensive record of Tumblr as a cultural phenomenon. This catalog does that work. Curating images, articles and song lyrics to both immerse and contextualize, letting assembled voices map the platform's rise and fall.

Tags:
Narrative Design,
Publication Design,
Research-Based Design,
Storytelling,
Typography
Image
Teenage girls pick and choose which parts of themselves to share, and after a time, get to believing that bodies are things they can edit like the photos they post, or the captions they write to go with them.
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Something's missing!
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What a Tumblelog (Tumblr blog) actually looked like in 2013.
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Tumblr founder David Karp wanted to create something looser than a blog, more like a place to share without obligation. The articles here map what his idea became.