Make, Do, and Mend, 2025

RESEARCH, WRITING, PUBLICATION + EXHIBITION DESIGN / Taking the mending practice as a guide, Make, Do, and Mend is a series of five site-specific publications that make a case for mending as a graphic design practice. Its title references Make Do and Mend, a government pamphlet produced and distributed to housewives in World War II Britain. The minimal typographic gesture of added punctuation transforms the referential text from a command of wartime rationing to a call to action for graphic designers to bloom where they’re planted; to engage locally, actively, and quietly to shape change.

Read my statement on mending as a design practice here.

Olas, 2024

TYPEFACE DESIGN / Olas is designed to wave, echoing the ripples of a flag in motion. To achieve this movement, letters were composed on a grid made of straight vertical lines and waving horizontal lines. The final outcome of Olas (meaning waves in Spanish) is a bold, sans-serif display typeface that ripples across the page, paying homage to the waving flags of Chicago’s Humboldt Park. Posters and type specimens of Olas are on view at the Design Museum of Chicago through April 2025. Download Olas through Design Museum Chicago.

Tampering, 2024

EXPERIMENTAL PUBLICATION DESIGN / Tampering is a zine project that explores the publication’s formal potentiality for dually concealing and disseminating radical content. The visible outer layer of the zines is decorated with found language from commercial feminine care packaging, which centers themes of normalcy, safety and dependability. When unrolled, a competing publication is revealed, which compiles of content mined from feminist archives and health organizations about historical resistance to authoritarian power and contemporary advice for accessing reproductive care in precarious legal scenarios.

Band-Aid Solutions, 2024

EXPERIMENTAL PUBLICATION DESIGN / Inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, Band-Aid Solutions is a set of questions and statements that intervene in the problem-solving process, printed on yellow adhesive bandages. The series of phrases aim to provoke discourse about healing wounds large and small, mining the symbolic meanings of the bandage as both a tool for concealing a problem as well as revealing it.

Foreword

PUBLICATION DESIGN / Students were tasked to create minibooks about our future design careers, using automated tools to generate all content. I downloaded an automated service to suggest which photos to clean up from my cluttered camera roll, and used the first 50 trash-worthy photos as the images that would encapsulate my career, accompanied by effusive chatbot-generated captions. The book is titled Foreword, a homophone to forward that speaks to the section of a book upon which the author doesn’t exert control, the part that frames the author’s content with context. I aimed to bring a feeling of levity to the impossibility of comprehending the linearity of our narratives while living them. To emphasize the “deleted pixels” concept, I created the cover by manipulating and scanning the hole-punched, discarded remnants of the book’s test prints.

FAKE

POSTER DESIGN / As part of a poster workshop at in Basel, Switzerland, designers were prompted to make a large-format poster for an exhibition titled FAKE. Inspired by an image’s capacity to function as a fake object, my poster mimicked the ubiquitous form of a Swiss newsstand to encourage a viewer’s double take. Materials from the faux exhibition included a room dedicated to falsified media, so ‘fake news’ became a welcome associative echo of the poster’s visual message.

Grace Luxton About Email Instagram ©2025

Grace Luxton

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