Themester

IU alum Sophia Chryssovergis returned as one of the designers in this year’s Themester poster series. Chryssovergis also designed posters for Themester 2019 Remembering and Forgetting and Themester 2020 Democracy. Chryssovergis graduated in May 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. She currently works as a designer at a local marketing firm in Mason, Ohio, but has hopes to launch a freelance company with her twin sister Cassia in the future. Chryssovergis’s design work can be found online: sophiachryssovergis.com Her other art and crochet and printwork done with her sister can be found on Instagram, @byjinxdesigns, and their Etsy shop, ByJinxDesigns. 

 

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? 

In terms of what [the theme] means for me, I was thinking of it as a pretty broad theme because even though there are facts that exist in the world, everyone’s definition of truth is kind of different.  

Some of it is relative and the same goes for light. Obviously, it’s a thing, but it’s pretty abstract to represent in a design. Some of my thoughts were about space because Tracy [Themester’s staff coordinator] mentioned how [Themester] was going to happen around the eclipse.  

I think the thing that struck me the most was trying to circle around an idea that might be approachable for multiple people. I do that for a lot of my designs. I referenced a stained-glass window, but I use it to sort of tell a bigger story, or even a more metaphorical thing. I picked that because when I was researching light and truth in general, a whole bunch of different things came up, but the stained-glass window really resonated with me because for the longest time, even now, they’ve been used to tell stories and the stories that people tell are their truth or what they believe.  

 

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 always start with looking at a bunch of inspiration images. For this one, I was looking at different stained-glass windows and stained-glass seals because there’s the IU seal that actually says ‘Light and Truth’ in Latin and I was thinking of incorporating that into my design somehow. I was referencing a bunch of different seals that past artists have made in stained glass. I look through a bunch of things and then I narrow it down into a mood board. My mood board included stained-glass, possible colors I wanted to use, and layout ideas. I start with the mood board and the visual inspiration to get myself going and then I always go to analog sketching. What I wanted to do with this one was, as I already mentioned, highlight the IU seal, but Tracy didn't know if I could use the full IU seal for copyright reasons, so I ended up sketching my own seal.  

One thing I noticed in a lot of my visual research was this almost window looking seal. It had a cross going through the middle, sectioning it off into four pieces. I referenced light and truth in each of those four sections in the seal. I built the stained-glass window around it and I just wanted to highlight those themes. I worked on abstracting those themes even more and then I used colors like red and yellow to get those ideas across as well. Then, I moved into digital and I did it all on Procreate. I wanted to try sketching it by hand because I thought I would be able to achieve a really nice aged affect without making it too realistic because I knew that was going to take too long. I do like the sketched out textural style and I think it lent itself well to this design. 

 

You designed a poster for Themester 2019 for our “Remembering and Forgetting” theme and Themester 2020 for our “Democracy” theme. How has your style evolved and how did you tackle this theme differently?  

My “Remembering and Forgetting” poster was an even more abstract theme than “Light and Truth” because how do you represent that? I did it in a similar way where I went back to, not my digital design techniques, but my analog ones and the by-hand work. I did it in the “Light and Truth” poster as well, but my “Democracy” poster was very, very graphic. I think I used all vectors. I used a quotation mark as a symbol for diversity, democracy, and for using your voice as a person.  

That trajectory is interesting because I would say my “Light and Truth” poster is more similar to my “Remembering and Forgetting” poster and the “Democracy” poster is the outlier. I would say I still resonate really with all the styles I’ve used. The “Remembering and Forgetting” was probably the most abstract and I really do love abstract design. I love how the “Democracy” poster looked as well, but there was something special about the “Light and Truth” one. I have been really enjoying evolving my own style of design and breaking free from the really heavily graphic, vectorized elements.