Premise

A senior capstone of 2019, Redacted was an editorial tabloid designed with the eye of a conspiracy theorist. With the spin of the 2020 election in full swing, I was fascinated with the amount of mis-information that had run rampant on sites like facebook and twitter.

Bolstered by podcasters and talking heads on the news, objectively true information could be twisted to make snappy headlines or attention grabbing content. I began to wonder why and how these widely spread groups of people intermingled. This curiosity would become the groundwork for my capstone project and is a topic I am passionate about to this day.

Why a Newspaper?

Misinformation has a long history in print media. Yellow journalism was the original “fake news”, made to be as sensational and eye-catching as possible, they pushed for articles that would rarely stand as truthful. In our current time, papers like The Sun, and New York Post acted as my inspiration for a tabloid of my own.

The Eye of a Conspiracist

Conspiracy theorists can be overly paranoid, anxious of current events, and fearful of the future. In researching their backgrounds, I found many of them to have an interest in identifying information that met their narrative.

Confirmation biases run rampant through these circles, constantly looking for any data that can bolster their arguments, no matter how illegitimate. It was through this research that I developed the visual styles for REDACTED, with the goal of representing how the conspiratorial may view the world around them.