Role/Play
Programs
Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop
Date & Duration
Fall 2022, 7 weeks
Through interviewing subcultures, organizations, and individuals who engage in the activity of roleplaying, ROLE / PLAY magazine breaks down the significance of ROLE, in relation to identity, community, and belonging, and PLAY, in relation to imagination, escapism, and speculation. Our first issue puts us in conversation with amateur LARPer and DnD enthusiast Claire Schuler, as we discuss creating and embodying characters, to what it means to facilitate human interactions in imaginary worlds.
Collaborators
Proud Taranat, Charmaine Qui, Grace Li
Prepare for, and conduct a spoken interview with someone whom the team considers to be inspirational or admirable. Create a typographic system to publish this text. This system will be used to design a readable, engaging, navigable typographic experience of this interview via a publication of your own creation.
In order to start this project, my team (consisting of my classmates Grace, Proud, and Charmaine) and I started the brainstorming process in finding a subject for our interview. We went back and forth on many different ideas but landed on an interest in subcultures, forgotten hobbies, etc. with a particular interest in amateurs rather than professionals. From there, we focused further on an interest in LARP and Drag culture: both of these hobbies that deal with the concept of Person and Persona.
We decided to interview the Carnegie Mellon University Role Play Game Association’s (CMU RPGA) President Claire Schuler, to learn more about LARP culture. We titled our publication ROLE/PLAY.
We had our interview with Claire, which went swimmingly, asked a range of questions we had concocted about her interest in LARP and RPGs.
We explored basic design ideas using some typefaces we’d chosen, exploring cover ideas and eventually each moving on to tackling a spread according to how we’d split up our interview in chunks, each with a header. I took on the first.
We shuffled spreads, again and again, developing our ideas each time.
Once finalizing our layout, we ragged, proofread, ragged, proofread, finally leaving us with our final product.