Ava Rylee
Untitled
Class of: 2026
Major: Strategic Design and Management BBA
Medium: Photoshop / Illustrator work
Faculty: Aaron Krach
Prompt: Hyperobjects have been called Viscous, Molten, Nonlocal, Phased, and Interobjective, all beautiful but hard to define terms that require many, strategically chosen words to describe. What about illustrating visually? How can you represent a Hyperobject visually? Choose a Hyperobject to illustrate. Think about how difficult it seems to describe certain concepts visually, yet as designers and artists visual communication is key.
For this assignment, I decided to use photoshop and illustrator to modify a vintage cereal ad to make it look like they were selling microplastics. I found a photo of colorful pieces of microplastics that had been found in the ocean and used it to cover the cereal shown in the ad using photoshop. I left the strawberries and milk showing, so that the change was subtle and wouldn’t really be noticed if you were just quickly looking it over. After replacing the cereal and removing all irrelevant text, I moved the document to Illustrator, where I was able to find text that matched the original fonts and colors. I renamed the cereal to “Micro Plastics” and changed the tagline to “They’re Everywhere!”. I also changed the words on the box to say “Eat them everywhere”. Under the “ad”, I took away the text describing the old cereal and instead put a general summary of what micro plastics are and how humans can consume them. I decided to keep the Snap, Crackle, and Pop characters to make it extra clear that this was supposed to appear like a branded advertisement.