Digital Eternity
ACCOLADES2025 GBC School Of Design YES! Awards
Best in Show Honourable Mention
2025 Applied Arts Student Awards
Editorial Design Entire Book/Magazine
2025 RGD Student Awards
Award for Typography Honourable Mention
Digital Eternity is about the overlap of digital and physical technologies, centred around an annual editorial magazine, tackling topics of changing technology and the preservation of media. The inagural issue, Media Lost/Media Found, focuses on the issue of Lost Media and taking the necessary
steps to ensure that pieces of culture are properly preserved.
The Magazine
Producing a magazine for this topic was something I had my heart set on since the very beginning. Editorial design was something I always had interest in, but never thought I really excelled in the area, so I wanted to challenge myself with an editorial project for this thesis. Discussing these topics to educate the young adult audience made the most sense to be a magazine in my mind, allowing each of the cases to be their own articles diving into how these pieces of media were lost, and how they were retrieved.
The magazine is split into four chapters, Past, Found, Lost, Future. Past focuses on the basic information about the preservation of media and important figures in the area. It discusses The Internet Archive, an organization that plays a large part in modern day media digitization and free distribution. It also discusses archivist Marion Stokes, who recorded over 30 years of television, archiving hundreds of hours of television we could’ve otherwise lost.
Found focuses on pieces of media once lost but eventually recovered in often unlikely ways. A piece of media included in this chapter is The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film from the early 20th century that was censored and destroyed, but later discovered in the 80s in the storage room of a mental institution in Denmark.
Lost discusses cases of lost media still under investigation. A personal favourite topic from this chapter includes London After Midnight. A 1930s silent film considered one of the first vampire movies that was lost in the MGM studio fire and never been recovered since.
The magazine concludes with the Future chapter, discussing the current and future landscape of digital preservation in a landscape of AI and copyright battles.
The magazine is 10x13 inches, and bound with white wire-o, both decisions inspired by large size archival binders.
The magazine is split into four chapters, Past, Found, Lost, Future. Past focuses on the basic information about the preservation of media and important figures in the area. It discusses The Internet Archive, an organization that plays a large part in modern day media digitization and free distribution. It also discusses archivist Marion Stokes, who recorded over 30 years of television, archiving hundreds of hours of television we could’ve otherwise lost.
Lost discusses cases of lost media still under investigation. A personal favourite topic from this chapter includes London After Midnight. A 1930s silent film considered one of the first vampire movies that was lost in the MGM studio fire and never been recovered since.
The magazine concludes with the Future chapter, discussing the current and future landscape of digital preservation in a landscape of AI and copyright battles.
The magazine is 10x13 inches, and bound with white wire-o, both decisions inspired by large size archival binders.
The Posters
Inspired by Christopher Doyle’s Natasha Cantwell poster series I saw during his talk at Design Thinkers 2024, I used repeating text on a strict grid over top of a halftone duo toned image of the media in question; obscuring the photo to give it an experimental
Everything Else
Website — Week after week one of the first critique’s Nicola always had about the posters was that there was no direct call to action or direction of traffic. I felt uneasy about including a link to a website that I did not create on something as personal as this project, so I created a landing page website to direct people to the different websites they can find or report information to. I created this website on Cargo.
Motion — I love analog technology and love working with older systems to see the effects and texture they can make that modern systems simply can’t recreate. I found a 5’ black and white CRT television and created an animation of my magazine’s nameplate, reminiscent of that era of televisions.
VHS Sleeve — When I imagine Digital Eternity as an organization in the real world, I imagine that they would aid in the distribution of found pieces of media after recovered. My response to this thought was to design a VHS sleeve for a missing film discussed in the magazine, London After Midnight, as if it was being released after found.
Brand Book/Process Book — The last thing I had created for this project was this process book. I had felt the need to document the process of creating this project, as something to close the book on this project for good. Designed at exactly half the size of the full magazine, this book was created for myself to display the amount of thought and attention to detail truly went into this project, but also to reflect on these past 8 months of my design career.
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