Graphic Design Statement

It’s August 9th as we’re reading the editorial statement from the architecture arm of Paprika!’s leadership team, and according to the weather forecast, New Haven will be hitting a high of 90 degrees, and feeling like 95. It’s HOT!

In this heat, we’re thinking about what kinds of things are born from passion, from caring, sometimes, a little too much. We’ve spent the summer enveloped in designing for clients, executing the visions of others and it feels apt to start the year by tending towards our own work instead: projects that exist outside of a brief, projects that feel like play.

Inspired by Rudolph Hall catching fire in 1969 (allegedly from student protests, though this has been widely debated), we want to start some sparks of our own. The visual language of this issue is centered around heat maps and gradients. Experimentations with thermal paper built the anchoring identity of this issue while blending analog with digital to “fry” the rest of the imagery so to speak.

Maybe this stems from a desire to hold onto the last bits of summer before the cold days set in and graduate work piles itself. Maybe it’s a subconscious wish to play for just a bit longer, a welcome warmup piece to start off a busy semester. Whatever it may be, we wanted to lean into heat as the emotional fuel that drives the care we all prioritize here at Paprika!. As an extension towards our community, we hope this issue finds you at a point of connection, or simply an issue to carry you through the last days of summer. This is the first issue of Volume 15 of Paprika!, and we want it to come hot off the press.

Warmly,
Graphic Design Coordinators