Graduate Thesis: Graphic Lenses

In my undergrad studies in literature, I was trained to identify how meaning is constructed, analyze it through multiple critical frameworks, and articulate why and how a work does what it does. When I entered graduate school for graphic design, I encountered robust frameworks for form. But none for meaning. 

Then I noticed it outside of school. Visually striking design abounds, but scratch the surface and there's rarely deeper conceptual work at play. The question became an obsession: if graphic design is the union of word and image, why are the words so often an afterthought? If writers and critics have centuries of robust frameworks for understanding how written communication makes meaning—why does graphic design have no equivalent? 

Graphic Lenses adapts four pillars of literary study—literary devices, genre, critical lenses, and rhetoric—into a practical framework for design practice, giving designers a critical vocabulary for what their work is doing: not just how it looks, but how it reads, and for whom. The same tools that make stories resonate translate directly: metaphor to emphasize brand values, the conventions of horror to power an anti-smoking campaign, an ecocritical lens to diagnose greenwashing in packaging, rhetoric to make a compelling design pitch. The translation felt less like adaptation and more like recognition. These disciplines share more fundamental DNA than either has acknowledged. 

The final deliverable is a two-sided book: one side adapts literary methods for design, the other demonstrates how design offers new tools for literary analysis. You can't read both sides without turning the object over. The form performs the thesis. A companion website hosts live tools from the book.

Graphic Lenses argues for literary thinking as the missing counterpart to design thinking—already at work in practice, but waiting to be named. The result expands the discipline's central question from "does it look good?" to "what does it mean, what is it doing, and for whom?"