Alchemy Mixology is the product and subsequent campaign that I created with Annie Hua, Eden Kraitberg, Anahita Rafieian and Julianna Velocci. 

Alchemy Mixology is a sophisticated cocktail kit, combining medicinal herbs with alcohol to provide users with a distinct “buzz” that corresponds with the feelings our sub-brands Bliss, Zest, Calm, and Focus elicit. The brand is luxurious and mysterious and caters to our customer’s desire for refined products and unique experiences.

I show this project in detail and describe the elements created as well as the process we went through to create this brand. 

Here’s a sneak peak . . . 

To see more check out the Behance page for this project: https://www.behance.net/gallery/121160749/Alchemy-Mixology-CMC-Project/modules/689375525

Twyla Tharp, the subject of an exhibition . . .

I put this brochure together in my typography class and absolutely loved doing it. I approached it like I would go about choreographing a program on ice. Twyla Tharp, my subject, an exceedingly successful artist, dancer, teacher and choreographer, was truly my inspiration in going about the design this way. My goal was to create images on the pages from the text alone. I wanted someone to be able to look at the piece and understand what was being conveyed on each page without having to read it. I believe I accomplished and am quite proud of the way this piece came together. 

Click the image to see the full case study.

I drew on multiple articles include interviews with Tharp and even one of her own books, “The Creative Habit”. This was a special project to me. I can relate to a lot of what she discusses and understand her values. Accordingly, I didn’t want to take something already written. I wanted to curate the article I would use myself. So drawing on numerous sources, I put together the body copy of this brochure. 

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed finding the information and putting it together. I hope that from reading this, you will be able to have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the typographic images. 

“Sternum up. Breathe deep. Shoulders back. Now we stride.” A lesson from Twyla Tharp in allowing our bodies to take up space, even as we grow older. This is what she refers to as amplitude – “amplitude, moving out, constantly feeling that you can move out. As age becomes reality, I think we start to retreat, we retract, we become protected, we become secluded and we begin to ossify.” She continues on to say, of the body becoming smaller, “well, that’s its problem, let’s just get on with it, shall we?”

Tharp is one of the great choreographers of our age, and at 78, she’s got a new dance – we met at a rehearsal at the American Ballet Theatre – and a new book, Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life. When asked about it, Tharp replied, “I wrote this to help others believe that constantly you can be evolving. That you don’t accept the rumour that, as the body ages, it becomes less. It becomes different. Hopefully more. I look at it as a self-survival book.”  In this book, she provides a series of exercises, and says age is not the enemy; stagnation is the enemy.

I had a chance to sit down with her for an interview. During which, she spoke directly to this saying, “we all have that laid on us by our culture. Being squirmy is not really – you can’t do this at dinner parties. But this is how you keep your system, your metabolic system rolling by going – you don’t do it like this.” I knew she wanted me to get ‘squirmy’ and us both to move around and fidget together whilst talking. As Tharp says, “if you keep doing this, chances are your body is going to be more productive in the moment, and you’ll have something left in the evening, particularly as you become older, and you buy into this reality that older folks can do less. Ok, prove it.”

Her own physical routine is legendary. I watched an early morning workout at her home studio, breathing and stretching, cycling, and various kinds of strength and resistance exercises. She said, “I could bench my body weight for three, and I dead-lifted 227 pounds to the waist. Which was twice my body weight, ok? So – but I developed a core strength that the classical dancer doesn’t have. Now, in making a piece of this sort, for a classical dancer, I can bring that kind of physical intelligence to them and say, try it this way.”

Tharp also speaks to the process of creativity and her relationship with it. She says in her book, The Creative Habit, “I believe that we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them. Being creative is not a once-in-a-while sort of thing. Being creative is an everyday thing, a job with its own routines. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell. The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.”

I transitioned to talking with Tharp about her motivations. I asked her what she does and what she thinks about when motivating herself or others for that matter. She said, “slight realism, not too much, just enough”. When asked to elaborate she explained, “you’ve got to be realistic about what people do and this is a good thing because everybody is very different so it has to be seen as a positive thing not that they cannot do something but that they can do something and then the next thing is to lift the bar as high as possible because everybody wants to be challenged and when people are challenged to work they do better than when they’re not.”

When asked about sources of motivation for her creative works, she notes passion as being an important factor. “Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above your craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering.  Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”

I asked what she looks for specifically in a collaborator. Tharp replied, “well, if you’re asking me about dancers, each of them is unique. What I look for is, well, I always say they cause me to fall in love with them. They must have a technical grounding. They have to have intelligence, a desire to be challenged, and a sense of humor. On stage, they must be beautiful. I learned what I want to see in the on-stage love interests from reading 19th-century novelists. Tolstoy, Dickens and Balzac to name a few.” Reading taught her about psychological reality, about how an “it” couple functions.

Beyond talent, Tharp says the quality she most looks for in a dancer is optimism. She believes security and confidence in oneself is important. “Have a sense that you can do it, and if you don’t, you’ll fix it, you’ll make it work and you’re going to laugh this time. No, you haven’t failed. You turn it into comedy.”

I wanted to hear more about the driving force behind Tharp’s words. In her books she discusses how she fulfills her dreams and how she structures her life. I asked her to go beyond what we know, staying in good health and being physically fit and maintaining positive mental health. I was curious what else she thought about in that process and what she feels pushes her to do these things with such commitment. The answer, discipline. She draws inspiration from 19^th and 20^th century novelists, such as George Eliot and Proust, and reads everything about them, namely biographies along with their works, letters and journals. Tharp says, “if you want to understand these things it’s depth pursuit and the novelists become your best friend. They’re very good friends to have because their style and way of doing things is very informative and the amount of discipline that each one of them had in doing their work is in fact the magic word, inspiration.”

Tharp believes how she started to develop her style as a dancer and as a choreographer was all due to discipline. She recalls, “I was fortunate [to have] had a mother who insisted on complete discipline, so we got that out of the way by the time we were 10 years old. Then from there it was about breaking the discipline down.”

This intense discipline she applies to her energy and curiosity when working on a piece. I wanted to understand how she uses this as an inspiration. Can other people, those who want to make a lifestyle change, derive the same inspiration to do so in this way? Tharp says, “it is ultimately about faith. It is ultimately that you got to believe you can do it and have the faith that it can get done. And get as close to it as you can. And I think that that’s as much as you can really say about it. I mean it takes a huge amount of faith, commitment to accomplish something. And if you don’t have the faith, there’s no point in starting. First thing you got to believe that what you want to accomplish is really important and it will make a difference to people. And then there’s the skill in encouragement, that there’s a generosity and a willingness to put your own ego aside and allow what can be offered from the other person to come to the fore.”

One of Tharp’s trademarks as a choreographer is how her dances meld careful consideration and precision with an organic sense of freewheeling movement. “I’ve always understood there is a notion of structure, and then the notion of vernacular,” she noted. “I listen to a lot of music. And I think that any good composer is equally adept with that which springs out of contemporary life, and that which is more disciplined. You’ve got to be all things, why exclude? You have to be everything.”

Tharp says her creative motivation has remained consistent throughout her career. She says, “my intention has always been to do the best work I can do. And, also, analyzing how the conditions and situations — both of myself and the world that exists when I have done a work — has changed. In other words, where are we now? When I worked with the Beach Boys in the early 1970s, the feeling for that kind of music was very different than after I worked classical musicians. So when I worked with (Talking Heads’ co-founder) David Byrne (on 1981’s ‘The Catherine Wheel’), I contemplated how has the work I do changed? And how has the audience’s understanding changed of what that work is from those two realms, which are obviously very different.”

I decided to switch gears and ask about her take on failure. In her book, Keep It Moving, she advises people to accept failures and take risks. When asked about her own failures and how she’s overcome them, Tharp instantly rejected the use of the word. “They’re not failures”, she said. “Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. They’re adventures of a different sort. You may not have gotten what you set out to get, but there is something to be learned from everything. There are lessons learned in different ways.” But how can you teach the people who don’t understand that? It is not an easy lesson to learn. Tharp doesn’t think it can be taught in advance. She explained it with a metaphor, suggesting it is like when you hear someone say, “that stove is hot – don’t touch it.”

As for what she does when something goes wrong, Tharp said, “the first thing you got to do is figure out what your game is and keep it going. If you missed the basket you don’t stop and go, ‘oh I missed the basket’. You get the ball, run around to the other end and try to keep going. As you go, or certainly at the end of that game, you replay that game in your head and you go, ‘why did I miss that fucking basket?’ And you also look at, ‘how fast was my pickup time?’ ‘How long did I lose?’ ‘How long did I leave that missed basket’ and, ‘did it cost me in my life?’ As little time as possible would be the answer. Get on with it, you know? And it’s very difficult. Obviously, there’s embarrassment involved, there’s shame involved, you lose money, this is involved, you lose momentum. The whole nine yards. But it’s either, get going or quit.”

Tharp also mentions in her book that she is always asked how she keeps working, the subtext being, at her age. Tharp’s response to this when asked directly, “Day by day, daily. Do it every day. It’s what you do. I look at the past to see what works and let go of what doesn’t work and build on what does work.”

As our interview came to an end, I wanted to mention a profile of her done in The Times. I began to read the quote aloud, “Ms. Tharp remains among the very few female choreographers . . .”, she cut me off and said, “oh, please. Give me a break” in an irritated way. I finished, “ . . . to have had a lasting influence on ballet”. Quick to respond, Tharp said, “why don’t they say, one of the few short choreographers to have an influence on the ballet? The female nomenclature is highly abusive, it’s ghettoizing and it’s irrelevant to what I’ve done. I’m not interested [in hearing about it at all]. I’m a worker. I’m an artist. I make dances, end of story. Judge me with the best. Don’t judge me with the best women.”

The final piece of advice that Tharp gives all of us in her book is, shut up and dance. I asked her to tell me more. Tharp said, “that’s right” in a strong and adamant tone. She continued, “shut up and do what you love. And be grateful and keep doing it. And stop second-guessing it. I’m getting old. I can’t do what I love. Bullshit, in a word. It’s going to change. That’s all. It’s not going to be the same, it’s going to be different.”

I chose Ok Go as my musician/band of focus for this design project because I was inspired by their creative, unique and exciting music videos. This band made a name for themselves through their videos. I felt like there was so much content I would be able to draw on. I felt they would be a fun group to design a magazine feature article for. 

Click the image to see the full case study. 

Article (I didn’t want to take someone else’s article. That would be too easy. So, I researched the band, and compiled the information into this article. Enjoy.

Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation.

For a long time, Ok Go was fairly conventional. Their guitar-driven, radio-friendly rock led to them being picked up by a major label, EMI, and they made two albums that built up a tight fanbase. They made videos too, including one for their first single, “Get Over It” in 2002.

Their songs are on the radio, they’ve played sold-out shows, but the group is far better known for their complex and elaborate videos. OK Go did not set out to create a new way for a band to connect with their fans. Or to change the way that people relate to music through the internet. But their first video and subsequent ones did just that. The first viral video they put out on their own was an accidental success: the band made a tape of its intentionally goofy stage dance and put it online. It was 2005, the same year that YouTube was founded and the idea of a “viral video” online was just entering the lexicon.

Recognizing the growing popularity of websites like YouTube, in 2005 the group shot a campy dance video for “A Million Ways,” a song from its sophomore album, Oh No. It was not intended as a band video, but EMI heard about it and demanded that it be killed – the words “gay” and “career suicide” were used, apparently. Kulash, no fan of being told what to do, slipped the footage to a fan and it quickly found its way on to a new-ish internet site called YouTube. It was the start of OK Go and their label heading along divergent paths that would lead to them parting company in 2010. Despite the fact that it quickly became the most downloaded music video in history.

The band, for their part, stumbled on the realisation that the internet could be a forum for making art and not just money – or as they are apt to put it: “We just wanted to keep having good ideas and creating awesome shit.”

The treadmill video (“Here it Goes Again”) came next, a natural, if inspired, progression from “A Million Ways”. Earning Ok Go a Grammy Award, this video features the bandmates dancing and jumping back and forth between a row of eight treadmills in a synchronised routine.

Unconsciously, the band started formulating rules that would serve them well in the digital world. Their videos were emphatically DIY and homespun, eschewing tricks and soulless computer generation. They were funny but not comical. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” says Ross, “but we take what we do really seriously and I think that shows.”

But what makes OK Go really special is that, even as the scale of their projects and ambitions have increased, they have remained resolutely un-fake. Kulash recalls his favourite part of the treadmill video being, “the transfixed concentration on Konopka’s face, which screams: “Please don’t let me be the one who messes this up!” Kulash laughs. “I imagine that everyone in pretty much every band out there is thinking: ‘Thank God I’m not in OK Go,'” he says. “Every other drummer is going: ‘I’m really glad that in my band what I do is hit drums and they don’t put me in a blue tutu.’ But Dan loves it.”

For Kulash, the kick is that OK Go have taken control of their lives in a way that most bands can only dream of. “In the big old system, you had to play by somebody’s else’s rules,” he says. “We have now found a place where we’ve made our own rules, and they are weird and inefficient, and they don’t make anyone super-rich but they do pay our bills and let us keep doing this stuff. Nobody can step in and stop us; we can’t get dropped from ourselves, the internet can’t pull our contract.”

Their videos continue to come from simple ideas, as Kulash puts it, but complex in practice. For instance, the video for “This Too Shall Pass” required five months’ work from 60 engineers to set up, and then two days and 85 takes to get a winner.

The band, and its publicist, have been fielding requests for years from teachers who want to use their videos in their classrooms. Kulash says, “Teachers I talked with say they weave the band’s videos into lessons about science, math and art — introducing concepts like gravity, transfer of motion, perspective, quadratic equations, parabolas and the importance of failure and persistence.”

The band’s, lead singer Kulash admits, they are “nerds themselves.” And eventually, they saw a way to turn all this interest into an opportunity: a partnership with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and subsequent creation of Ok Go Sandbox.

Ok Go Sandbox is a free website with educator guides that include material lists, assignments and suggested vocabulary words. There are videos that go behind the scenes with the band members to explain the concepts. “The universal thing we’re trying to get at is just curiosity and wonder,” says Damian Kulash. “That excitement about the world, where you want to uncover something magical.”