Vector Spring 2018

Doing a photo collage for the cover was an exciting excuse for me to collaborate more with the Vector staff. Working with a staff of fun, creative, and articulate people was a blast and I wanted to do more. So right before Spring Break, I sent a request to the photo staff asking for pictures of cool structures that they saw over their vacation, and I got back a huge variety of pictures.

At this point, I realized there was a huge potential for visual metaphors that I could build into in the cover. All the different photos made me realize that I could take the variety of subjects shot by the photographers and work it into a vision of the future as a way to say the future is a collaboration of different ideas.

I had also been exposed to the work of the architectural studios Superstudio and Archizoom at the time, and these were professionals dedicated to showing the future. So I took inspiration from them and drew the outlines of buildings into the scene as stand-ins for technology that does not exist yet.

I also styled the floor after the Superstudio aesthetic as a sort of easter egg for people familiar with the studio. Also I thought it was a cool aesthetic and it was a fun graphic to make. While I was doing all of this, I wanted the university to be in the middle of it all since “What Starts Here Changes the World” is the motto of UT Austin, so I made all the buildings sprout out of the main tower so that we were in the middle of it all.

The cover was a huge hit when we got the printed release. People would look at it and talk to their friends about what the coolest building was, or what they think each one was. It has a level of detail that let viewers pick it apart. It also communicated the essence of what the Vector staff thought the future would be. The future was developing, with the University of Texas being a big part of it; it was collaborative; and there was a huge potential in the future.