In the graphic design curriculum at UMass Dartmouth, the second semester of senior year is spent developing a senior thesis, or degree project. The project could be anything of our choosing, and is seen as the culmination of everything learned in the program over four years. For my project, I chose to focus on the care of pet hermit crabs. I changed the audience profile to something unexpected: rich, classy people. I wanted to add a sense of irony and humor by making hermit crabs seem like something that would appeal to this particular group.
I made book design a main component of my project. I made it a large, coffee-table book size so that it could work as a resource for how to care for pet hermit crabs but also serve as a book to pick up and flip through any time. Since I would be photographing my hermit crabs in various settings, the large size also worked because it completely changed the scale of the hermit crabs. In reality they are very small, so seeing them that much larger also adds to the humor of the book. Some aspects I had to think about while designing were how to work off of a grid (I used a nine-column grid throughout, which gave a lot of freedom and flexibility), a color system to use across the chapters, and how to separate the two different sections, caring for and how to have fun with hermit crabs.
