Claire Zhang's Portfolio

inseparable assembly is a temporary reading room curated by Wendy's Subway for the School for Temporary Liveness, hosted at The Kitchen. NYC.

Catalog, poster, and bookmark design for inseparable assembly, a reading room that invites shared study, reflection, and gathering. Envisioning the reading room as a space of social choreography, inseparable assembly iterates across a selection of titles centering performative, improvisational, and pedagogical practices; and citations and fragments that encourage self-guided movement and act as offerings or prompts for writing and annotation. Curated by Marian Chudnovsky and Rachel Valinsky, with support from Juwon Jun. The School for Temporary Liveness reimagines performance through the poetic frame of a school. It exists as an impermanent campus, hosting a series of situations for collective study and experiments in performance, practice, and pedagogy.

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration is an exhibition at The Jewish Museum featuring new works in painting, sculpture, and installation.

Overflow Afterglow advertising campaign designed with guidance from Yeliz Secerli. As a group show with 7 young artists of all mediums, I chose a text-based, color-focused approach to avoid highlighting just one artist's work and the emphasize the melding of shared concepts, themes, and colors shared between the artists. Each color in the gradient is one of the seven artists thematic color. The branding and concept was used for printed matter such as subway ads, the museum's kiosk, lightpole banners, New York Times Print Ad, and Artforum Print Ad, as well as digital matter, including a motion graphics version for the New York Times flex video advertising and Google display ads.

*Winner of the Type Director's Club Type Design Competition 71!* Invitation and branding package designed for the 38th Annual Purim Ball.

Our design explores the theme of concealment, a central motif in the story of Purim. The main inspiration came from groggers, the noisemakers traditionally used to drown out the name of Haman, the villain in the Purim story. We incorporated illustrations of these objects from the museum’s collection throughout the package. A gold silhouette of a horse-shaped grogger layered over the main invitation card partially obscures the event details to create a playful hide-and-seek moment while keeping the information legible. Designed in collaboration with Lauren Frank and with guidance from Yeliz Secerli.

She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Reader is a collection of essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination.

Commissioned by Wendy's Subway as the print component to The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition digital identity I designed in March 2022. In designing this book, I took careful consideration of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's own work as well as the work of the 25 contributors -- the wide range of works provided a set of difficulties and in creating a system for them for all 296 pages, I found much joy and satisfaction. Typefaces are GT Sectra and ABC Favorit. Designed with assistance from Patrick Yang MacDonald. Photos by Justin Lubliner.

The New York Jewish Film Festival is an annual film festival hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum.

Lead rebrand of NYJFF for the years 2023 and 2024. For the rebrand, I was inspired by the idea of scrolling credits, which includes an option for motion and still image. It also allowed for the variety of film stills that are used in promotion, with both right and left applications. I designed print and digital epehemera for this project including print posters, digital ads, and social media posts, with a motion graphic component. Done with assistance from Lauren Frank and guidance from Yeliz Secerli.

The Marta Minujín Kid's Guide is a guide made in conjunction with the first U.S. solo exhibition of Marta Minujín at The Jewish Museum.

Designed with guidance from Yeliz Secerli. Created a set of custom digital illustrations based off of Marta Minujín's signature bold stripes in her artwork, and incorporated them into the design of the educational Kid's Guide. The drawing spaces are made out of outlines of existing sculptures by Minujín, and the colors I specifically chosen from her body of work as well. The Kid's Guide was printed in an edition of 1500 and also put online on the JM's website for art-at-home.

Purim Ball is the annual fundraiser ball held at The Plaza, NYC for The Jewish Museum.

I lead the digital side of our annual Purim Ball branding, making animated graphics for our Evites and newletters to be sent to all patrons and members of the museum. These are in conjunction with the overall Purim Ball branding that our team creates each year. 2024 branding follows the theme of Birthday Party - for the Save the Date and After Party, I created illustrations of noisemakers and crowns from the museum's collection. 2023 branding follows the theme of poodles - for the Save the Date, I was inspired by lenticular cards. Link to Evite/Newsletter examples here.

The Quick & The Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha involved a two part design commission for publisher, Wendy's Subway.

For the first half of the project, I created an identity system based off of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's written and visual work: primarily inspired by her use of fragmentation. This part of the project involved designing a series of five lecture graphics for IG and web, as well as creating another series of graphics for the two commissioned artists attached to the lecture series. One is currently in progress, and for the other, I created a poster gif playing with obscuring and revealing text.

The second half of the project involves designing an end-of-series book that is a culmination of all the lectures and work submitted by participants in the lectures.

Recipes for Community is a project sown from a simple concept: sharing recipes to bridge distance.

The book documents an email chain I started in March 2021, connecting 6 people of Asian diaspora living in America, some of whom had met individually but have never come together as a whole. Through the cultural medium of cooking, Recipes for Community seeks to apply the essence of "cooking for one another" as a concept beyond cooking, one that can be applied to any form of connectivity and community. By having the participants share recipes, stories, pictures from their childhoods, and more, Recipes for Community unfolds beyond a "cookbook," transforming into an exploration of space, memory, community, and family, while building exactly that — a family.

Ostensibly, this book documents a community started as a space to provide healing for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during a year when the veil of model minority was pulled back to reveal how truly vulnerable we are and have always been to the violence of a perpetually foreign existence. However, I want this project to be a seed to grow more intimate, healing communities across digital and physical boundaries, not only for AAPI, but other marginalized communities as well.

Recipes for Community is both an object and an invitation — a way of reminding others the solidity of the communities we create, and an open invitation to join our table.

Queer Asian Euphoria is a zine created to document and celebrate the Asian diasporic community both online and in NYC.

This zine is a further exploration of community building, and how design can serve to connect people. This project pulls from instagram polls, emails, and text messages, asking the question, "What does Queer Asian Euphoria mean to you?" Printed and exhibited at Emergence Zine Fair with Hyperlink Press.

Long Distance Relationship is a coding and design experiment.

This website acts as a poetic archive, documenting and comparing light from the West and East coasts. Link to website here.

A film poster designed and illustrated by commission for Evers Pund's award winning short film, Remnants.

Traditionally illustrated using watercolor and ink, copy designed on Indesign and Photoshop.

(PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE)

Sept 2022 -

The Jewish Museum, Junior Graphic Designer

Working within all areas of print and digital design in a small team of 3. Supporting the Museum's overall visual identity through exhibition graphics, programs, invitations for programs, onsite signage and multi-channel advertising. Notably, led the rebrand of the New York Jewish Film Festival, as well as the advertising for Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé and Overflow Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration.

Jan 2020 -

Freelance Graphic Designer

Select clients include: Graywolf Press, Nightboat Books, and Wendy's Subway. Main areas of freelance include branding and book design for independent publishing, as well as film production work in the feature film industry.

Apr 2022 -
Aug 2022

18 Million Rising, Digital Design Intern

Social media and digital design for a grassroots Asian-American activist organization. Led the rebranding of the Did You Eat Newsletter and graphics for Instagram. Culminated in a workshop where I walked the team and members of 18MR through a case study of a digital postcard I designed in support of the Vision Act.

Aug 2019 -
Jun 2021

Synoptic Office, Research Assistant

Interviewed visiting designers for Parsons Lecture Series on the intersection of culture and design, published in 1, 10, 100 Years: Form, Typography, and Interaction at Parsons. Created assets for exhibitions, including the 2021 Venice Biennale and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Motion design and graphics. Research for web projects including the Chinese Type Archive.

June 2021 -
Sept 2021

Lolita Bandita, Bloomeffects Design Intern

Designed assets for client Bloomeffects, including digital assets like GIFs, social media graphics, and advertising graphics, as well as internal assets, including pitch decks, brand books.

May 2020 -
Oct 2020

The Brooklyn Rail, Production and Social Media Assistant

Worked with entire editorial team to produce assets for social media, including captions and graphic content, like GIFS and event posters. Edited video content for artist studio visits and lectures both for Instagram and Youtube, creating captioning and concise videos. Helped organize initiatives and programs such as The New Social Environment.

Jan 2019 -
Jul 2019

Lipman Studio, Art Direction Intern

Design research, creating pitch decks and development presentations. Retouching, layout, and graphic design for print and web, animating gifs and web banners. Video editing using Premiere and After Effects.

(EDUCATION)

2023

Type@Cooper, Animating Variable Type with Romello Goodman

2022

Nightboat Books Design Fellow

2017 - 2021

Parsons School of Design, BFA in Communication Design
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, BA in Literary Studies, Writing

2020

School for Poetic Computation, Digital Love Languages with Melanie Hoff

(SKILLS)

Proficient in Adobe Creative Suite, including Indesign, Illustrator, After Effects, and Photoshop.
Expertise and affinity in motion graphics and time-based design.
Confidence in both print and digital creation practices.
Experience in Exhibition Design, with a strong eye for interactive design in 3D spaces.
Extensive knowledge of Typography, Graphic imagery, and Illustration, always looking to learn more.
HTML, CSS, and Javascript, as well as Figma and Github.
Writing, Creative and Analytical, detail-oriented copywriter.

(INVOLVEMENT)

Guest Lecturer at Pratt University. Teaching To Write in a Foreign Language, a workshop on writing and design.
Awarded a Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the Type Director's Club for 38th Annual Purim Ball.
Winner of Point of You Contest with i-D and Vice.
Co-organizer of Hyperlink Press's Emergence Zine Fair, 2022.
Tabled published zine at Printed Matter Book Fair, 2022-2023.
Performed debut writing piece, Solstice, 2022, at the New World Symphony in the Frank Gehry center.