Niharika Yellamraju
Adjunct Professor
Boston University
University of Connecticut
ALT began as a response to a recurring tension within graphic design practice: the expectation that every project must begin with a new idea. In many design environments, creativity is tied to the rapid generation of concepts, encouraging designers to prioritize novelty at the beginning of the process. This often creates a repetitive design process in which projects struggle to move beyond predictable visual patterns and familiar formal solutions.
ALT proposes an alternative approach through relational construction. Rather than beginning with a fixed concept, the work develops through the arrangement of elements and the relationships formed between them. Typography, images, sequence, scale, and structure are treated as active components that shape one another over time. The methodology operates through repetition, translation, sequencing, and restructuring, using constraint and variation to develop form across media.
The project takes form through books, typographic systems, websites, and serial print artifacts that move between print and digital contexts. Existing materials and visual structures are reorganized and recontextualized across formats, allowing the same content to shift through changes in scale, sequence, interaction, and reproduction. Printed pages may become scrolling surfaces, while production marks and repeated images are reused as structural and compositional elements. Through this process, ALT examines how graphic design can extend beyond static outcomes and operate as an evolving system across multiple contexts.
Situated within discussions of experimental publishing and process-driven design, ALT draws from traditions associated with figures such as Johanna Drucker, Ellen Lupton, and Massin. The project argues for a mode of practice in which meaning emerges through sustained formal relationships and the reorganization of existing structures rather than through idea-first authorship alone.
This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 26, 2026.