Francheska Cruz Graphic Designer Illustrator Web Designer NCEA Outstanding Design Scholarship Recipient NCEA LVL 2 Design Excellence Award Student in Digital Media and Design Unicorn

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"Sappho: That Lady On Lesbos!"

“Sappho: That Lady On Lesbos” was a year-long graphic design project I had completed in my final year of high school, exploring a wide range of skills I had learnt: typography, illustration work, formatting layouts, mock-up design, and a whole lot more. It culminated in the primary final product: a graphic novel that told a satirical, fictionalised, exaggerated retelling on the life of ancient Greek poet Sappho.

I referenced my typographic choices to Ancient Greek lettering, as well as the bold and decorative lettering of 1950s-60s graphic novels. The illustrative and typographic style of these novels were exaggeratedly dramatic and comedic in a way that I wanted to emulate for my own work. This decorative, ‘camp’ influence is present through every detail of this project.

“Sappho” fully showcases the breadth of my skills in a single project, exploring the way I tackle problems along the way in terms of composition and meaning behind the details, and the methods I use to present my final products.

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Yellowjackets™ Title Sequence

I had been given a Motion Graphics brief to reimagine a title sequence from a TV series. I chose to reimagine the intro of ‘Yellowjackets, as the original already contained interesting visuals that I’d like to expand upon in my own version. I adapted the original ‘broken VHS tape’ motif into my own concept, but with my own illustrations in a ‘paper cut-out’ style format that referenced the narrative of the show. I incorporated the glitch transitions present in the original.

This was my first major project fully done in AfterEffects, with assets created in Illustrator, and really pushed me beyond my comfort zone.

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"Rollin' Rools"

“Rollin’ Rools” was my first major web design and development project. It is a website that teaches users how to play the tabletop roleplay game ‘Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).’ During the creation process, I utilised a total of three softwares: Figma to create my prototypes, IbisPaint X to sketch my assets.

The website is fully functional on both desktop and mobile, incorporating the use of mobile responsive design and the addition of certain elements, such as hamburger menus, to make the site more accessible for mobile users.

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"Locating Lake House"

This brief required me to create a visual brand identity on an Aotearoa based topic - for this, I had chosen to create branding for a heritage campaign based on a historical building, Lake House Arts Centre. I referenced the gabled style of architecture present in the building through my logo design, as well as the warm colours that are used on the roofing and have become iconic to the exterior design of the house.

To explore the visual identity I had created, I made a mock-up of a potential website for this campaign using Figma, detailing the history of the house using unique layouts and assets. I also animated a motion graphic on AfterEffects, meant to be viewed on phones, showcasing the history in a more bitesized format. The rest of the design process was done on Illustrator.

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"Queen's Counsel"

Queen’s Counsel is an up and coming punk band that I had the pleasure of designing a logo for. They wanted a mix of punk and medieval, Gothic themed visuals. As such, more decorative typography were chosen. A pictorial logo had also been experimented with, but in the end, there was a preference for purely the typography, letting it stand out more. I created a wordmark, with two alignment variations, as well as a monogram logo.

I created the assets using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop.