A curation of 49 works from current and previous students of the RISD Graphic Design Graduate Program at the Sol Koffler Gallery in Providence, RI.
Project overview
¹For Reference Only explores the uncertain trajectories of design work once it enters circulation. Featuring 49 works from current and past students of the RISD Graphic Design MFA Program, the exhibition interrogated the fate of design artifacts—whether they are engaged with meaningfully or relegated to fleeting digital consumption and archival obscurity. The show invited visitors to consider how design is encountered, remembered, and recontextualized over time, asking whether reference itself is a form of life or a kind of slow erasure.
Challenges
What happens to design after it is made? ¹For Reference Only examines the circulation, consumption, and afterlife of graphic design in a world of endless visual content.
Designers spend countless hours creating books, posters, websites, and experimental works—but once these pieces are out in public, how are they actually experienced? Are they meaningfully engaged with, or simply glanced at and forgotten? Are they saved as references, only to be recycled into future designs that might meet the same fate?
Results
The exhibition uses the idea of a footnote—¹—as both a visual and symbolic element. Visual cues drawn from footnote systems—numbering, annotations, typographic hierarchies—appear throughout the space, subtly reinforcing the theme of circulation and reference. The spatial experience invites visitors to move fluidly, making connections across works and reflecting on their own habits of viewing, saving, and referencing design.
A curation of 49 works from current and previous students of the RISD Graphic Design Graduate Program at the Sol Koffler Gallery in Providence, RI.
Project overview
¹For Reference Only explores the uncertain trajectories of design work once it enters circulation. Featuring 49 works from current and past students of the RISD Graphic Design MFA Program, the exhibition interrogated the fate of design artifacts—whether they are engaged with meaningfully or relegated to fleeting digital consumption and archival obscurity. The show invited visitors to consider how design is encountered, remembered, and recontextualized over time, asking whether reference itself is a form of life or a kind of slow erasure.
Challenges
What happens to design after it is made? ¹For Reference Only examines the circulation, consumption, and afterlife of graphic design in a world of endless visual content.
Designers spend countless hours creating books, posters, websites, and experimental works—but once these pieces are out in public, how are they actually experienced? Are they meaningfully engaged with, or simply glanced at and forgotten? Are they saved as references, only to be recycled into future designs that might meet the same fate?
Results
The exhibition uses the idea of a footnote—¹—as both a visual and symbolic element. Visual cues drawn from footnote systems—numbering, annotations, typographic hierarchies—appear throughout the space, subtly reinforcing the theme of circulation and reference. The spatial experience invites visitors to move fluidly, making connections across works and reflecting on their own habits of viewing, saving, and referencing design.