Themester

IU alum Julia Fegelman returned as one of the designers in this year’s Themester poster series. Fegelman graduated in May 2023 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design and previously designed a poster for Themester 2022 Identity and Identification. She is currently a full-time tattoo artist and works in a private studio in Bloomington. Fegelman’s design portfolio can be found online: juliafegelmandesign.com. Her tattoo work can be found on Instagram, @pineneedle.pokes and on her website, pineneedlepokes.com.  

 

This year’s theme is Lux et Veritas, or Light and Truth. What does that mean to you and how did you incorporate elements of that into the design? 

When I was thinking about the theme, I kind of took it pretty literally and not too deep. When I thought of light, I literally thought of sunlight, light coming in through the windows and I have a lot of plants so considering light is really important to me all the time. To me, truth can be interpreted in so many different ways, but I took it to be like scientific truth like facts and data. That went along with the sun, so I took an outer space approach. To me with light and truth, I automatically think about the stars and galaxies. I knew that the solar eclipse was happening next year, so I automatically gravitated towards that. It was pretty much light equals the sun and truth equals science, so it made sense to me to do something eclipse related.

 

Walk me through the creative process of creating the poster design. Where did your inspiration stem from and how did that develop into the final product? 

I just got my degree in graphic design at IU, so all I did was the same process that I did for all my projects in college. I sketched out a few ideas, brought them into Illustrator, made a bunch of iterations that I sent to Tracy. She chose the one she liked the best, and I wrote a quick blurb about the solar eclipse. It’s a pretty streamline process for me at this point because I did graphic design.

 

How has your style evolved from last year's theme "Identity and Identification" to this year's "Light and Truth"?

I don’t think it really has evolved to be honest. I feel like halfway through college, I settled on a style that I really liked and ran with it. Maybe this year’s is more digital than last year’s. Last year, I put ink on a tree, printed it onto the paper, and scanned it. That was a lot more hands-on, but for this [poster], I made fully on the computer and that changes the style by default. Thematically, they’re really similar in style and the compositions are similar.

 

What is the kind of style that you have stuck with until now? How would you describe it? 

Minimalism but playing a lot with white space and margins and borders. I like to do, for example on the poster, a huge circle that comes really close to the margins. It’s minimal, but it’s a little funky. It’s funky minimalism.