JANE ZHANG

ABOUT ME

I’m a recent graduate with a BFA in Communication Design and a minor in Human-Computer Interaction from Washington University in St. Louis. In my work, I strive to explore a diverse range of narratives, perspectives, and approaches through a variety of media, and I’m particularly passionate about the intersection between physical and digital media.

Recently, I’ve been interested in the nuances of multilingual typography and how the characteristics of different languages’ letterforms can be leveraged to enhance a concept across multiple linguistic demographics. Outside of my work, I love stories in any form, whether that means books, movies, or music. Lately, I’ve been watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and listening to Rat Boy.

Feel free to reach out with any inquiries about my work, and check out more below!

HOME / CLIENT WORK / ARCHIVE

WHERE? WHAT? WHERE?

The objective of this project was to create a short motion piece on an essay of our choice. I chose “Where? What? Where?” from White Sands by Geoff Dyer.

RESEARCH

I started by compiling excerpts and visual research on three texts: “52 Blue” from Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison, “Sacrifice” from How to Sit by Tyrese Coleman, and “Where? What? Where?” from White Sands by Geoff Dyer.

DEVELOPMENT

I narrowed down my more unique concepts to “52 Blue” and “Where? What? Where?” but ultimately decided to pursue the latter in order to explore themes of cycles and transience. I chose a train setting to convey the theme of endless movement with only brief stops and no final destination, and wanted to evoke a sense of fleetingness and nostalgia with hand-drawn elements and highly saturated color grading. I also animated the photos to slide like a GAF Viewmaster in order to touch on the artificial capturing of moments as well as the nostalgia of the sound of the childhood toy. The final piece leveraged these concepts with parallax movement to create a sense of cyclicity that was still imbued with meaning.