Madeline Black Communication Design BFA Thesis Portfolio Fall 2016

Adrift

Adrift is a vessel for stories and experiments that explore our complex connection to place. It’s a response to a longing for honest and personal narratives about travel and how it shapes us. Adrift is an archived collection of content created by contributors around the world, existing as a living, changing, breathing thing that can be experienced through a magazine, a website, a social media presence, and a designed experience. It’s a source of inspiration and meaning intended to encourage and support a new kind of traveler: one who realizes both how big and small the world is, who recognizes and appreciates diversity in perspective, experience, and opinion, and one who travels not just for pleasure but for reality.  Adrift shifts the authoritative and one-dimensional voice used by many travel publications to something that is more personal, focusing on the individual traveler and how their past and perspective may shape the way they see their surroundings. This visibility of the storyteller and the focus on their personal experience allows for multiple perspectives of a place to coexist, even if they contradict each other. Cities and places then become truer images of themselves; an overlapping collage of fragmented stories, people, and memories that is always changing. Adrift chases moments in life and in travel where discomfort and awe play equal roles, because that is where you find humor, joy, frustration, elation, relief and beauty. These moments confuse and contradict while clarifying and inspiring. These moments are why we travel. The theme of Adrift’s Issue Zero is The In-Between. 

19 albums

Fall 2016