Pierre Nguyen

Unofficial fan art tribute for Linkin Park and the passing away of their lead singer, Chester Bennington. The title and lyrics are from "One More Light," the title track on their last album of the same name.

Unofficial fan art tribute for My Chemical Romance, based on the title of their final greatest hits compilation album, May Death Never Stop You, that was released after the band split up.

This is an unofficial fan-made poster designed for CHVRCHES's first full-length album The Bones of What You Believe as a personal project.

In the poster, the letters of "BONES" act as the literal bones of the poster by creating the grid structure for the rest of the poster. With a band name based on the word "churches," a song called "Science/Visions," and a album title about the core of different beliefs, it was only natural to evoke different design elements with connections to religion, science, and magic.

The diagrammatical grid lines reference scientific drawings like those of Leonardo da Vinci's. At the same time, some of the lines along with the circle can be reminiscent of magic or occult spells and diagrams. The gridded tiles are meant to reference the tiled interiors of many older churches. Additionally, the fractal lines around the border of the poster were procedurally generated with Processing based on a close-up image of a heart and meant to look a bit like fractured stained glass windows also often found in churches.

An unofficial fan art booklet designed for Lights's We Were Here concert tour. The large circular symbol is based on the official logo/symbol for the Skin & Earth album and comic book tie-in. Here, I used that same symbol to literally mark where we were on a map for the LA stop of the We Were Here concert tour.

For my final year of CalArts undergrad, I explored a few different experiments in fictional storytelling through the use of graphic design, where writing and design were deeply integrated from beginning to end in order to create new types of stories and forms of storytelling beyond traditional books and films.

One of these experiments was a serialized story told through weekly screen printed posters. The format allowed for a shared public reading experience, as people followed along the story week by week and discussing among themselves. Inevitably, the feedback I heard affected the story and design for the next weekly installment, creating a dialogue between author/designer and audience.

In addition to the serialized poster novel, I also had two displays next to it to showcase the real inspirations behind the project. One display was about old serial novels made famous by Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, back when serial novels were made out necessity because it was cheaper to print in newspapers when books were still too expensive for the general public. Another display featured photos of prisons and quotes from real prisoners that inspired the characters for my fictional serial poster novel.

A practical application of such a form of storytelling could be implemented in places like bookstores, where weekly installments can invite readers to revisit regularly to experience and discuss with fellow shoppers following the story—something that can only be done with a public storytelling experience and not a traditional book.

Or, a similar type of public weekly poster storytelling could be done at places like bus stops where people already visit on a consistent regular basis as part of their daily routine. This type of storytelling could turn ads that people would otherwise ignore into content that could add value to people's daily lives and connect readers together in a public space.

KarmetiK Machine Orchestra reinterprets several traditional Indian fables based on samsara—the Sanskrit concept of the cycle of birth, life, death, and reincarnation—with musicians, electro-mechanical instruments, dancers, and multiple speakers. For the poster design, we illustrated some characters that appeared throughout the fables and combined those motifs with elements of mechanical parts. The central circle simultaneously serves as a sort of Circle of Life while also being an illustration of a top-down view of one of the Machine Orchestra's drum machines. The custom type was inspired by traditional Sanskrit language writing.

THEM originally premiered in 1986, sparking controversy for addressing gay love and the AIDS epidemic on stage. Twenty-five years later, the original creators decided to recast and reconstruct THEM again because of its continued relevance. For the poster design, we chose to hint at the violence that engulfs the same-sex relationships in the performance.

Daniel Eisenberg's The Unstable Object is a visual essay that examines the relationships between objects and their makers, objects and their consumers, and between makers and consumers through those same objects that connect them together. In an increasingly global economy, consumers know nothing about the objects they buy are made or anything about the individuals who are involved in physically producing the objects they buy, yet these individuals are intrinsically connected through time and space through the objects.

The filmmaker explores these relationships and ideas by going on-location to document the production of three different objects. One of those places is a Volkswagen factory in Dresden, where people who have bought a car have the opportunity to look behind glass as their specific car are hand-built by specialists. He also takes us to Chicago Lighthouse Industries, where wall clocks are created by blind workers. And finally, we are also shown a to a cymbal factory in Istanbul, where cymbals are still cast and hammered by hand, exactly as they were 400 years ago.

For the poster, we wanted to visually combine these themes of the mechanical with the human connection of physical hands making products. Metallic silver and brown inks were used to contrast the color of shiny mechanical parts with the color of dirt. Additionally, the poster also incorporated my own fingerprints and life-sized handprint, incorporating my own human touch into the final product.

Even the making of the poster itself inherently reflected this relationship of machine (the computer), the human hand (screen printing), the object created from that human-machine relationship, and then connecting us to the consumers who see the poster, who then watch the film.

After twenty-six years, the annual SCREAM (Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music) festival put on one final show with works by four masters of electro-acoustic music. We took scans of actual sheet music from each of those four composers and composed our poster design with those elements.

For a Machine Project lecture titled "Dark Matter," created a simple poster filled with "Dark Matter" with the lecture information mixed in and printed everything in clear ink on black poster paper. As a result, when people walked by the poster in the halls, they would see apparently blank black posters—something unusual in a typically visually noisy environment— which would prompt them to stop and come closer to read the poster up close.

A copy of this poster has been acquired by LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) as part of their permanent collection featuring Machine Project posters.

This was my submission for the 2012 CalArts Jazz CD album art.

I created three spot illustrations that were used for the Scripps Magazine Fall 2016 Election Issue in an article spotlighting Scripps alumnae who were helping shape major issues in the 2016 election. The illustrations were used for "Environment," "Economy," and "Immigration" topics in the article.

A typographic poster inspired by modernist architect Louis Kahn. Louis Kahn was known for creating inspiring, poetic, monumental spaces inspired by ancient ruins using modern raw building materials like brick and exposed concrete. Similarly, this poster takes the fundamental elements of type to create building material out of individual letters as well as words, sentences, and paragraphs to form an architectural structure. The overall design of the poster is meant to reflect the monumental, monolithic, and symmetrical characteristics that define many of his buildings.

Leading up to the 2012 elections, instead of making posters to support a particular candidate or attack the other, I thought it'd be most useful to take the time to create a neutral poster reminding students at CalArts when and where to vote, along with free neutral take-home voting guides to get busy students up to speed on the issues at stake.

Alex Ketch led the research and together we created a neutral guide (to the best of our abilities) that provided a quick overview of each candidate's stances on major issues as well as an overview of all the California props on the ballot. We cited our sources on the guide and encouraged everyone to do their own additional research in order to have the most informed opinion as possible when it came time to vote.

For the days leading up to the election, we would continue to reprint, fold, and refill the posters with fresh voting guides every few hours as it ran out. At the voting polls on election day, several of these guides were seen left behind after people had taken these guides we made with them to the polls.

A personal project inspired by the Voyager Golden Record launched into space with sounds and images of Earth for other intelligent extraterrestrial life to discover. Among the various music and sounds on the record was most "Greetings in 55 languages."

I took the audio waveform of the clip of "Hello from the children of planet Earth" from those recordings and incorporated it into the design here along with some of the actual symbols and illustrations etched onto the Golden Record. The overall design revolves around the visual pun of Earth floating in space but at the same time Earth is also the center of a top-down view of a record being played on a record player—the sounds of Earth being played into space from the Golden Record and Earth itself simultaneously in real-time.

Ross McElwee's Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation is a documentary film released in 1986 and won a Sundance FIlm Festival Grand Jury Prize the following year. The filmmaker's original intention was to create a documentary retracing the steps of Sherman's March to the Sea, a historic 1864 American Civil War military campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, and interviewing people along the way to learn about the military campaign's effects on the community over a century later.

However, not long before filming began, Ross McElwee went through a tough breakup which made him so distracted that the focus of his documentary shifted from the historic military campaign to his own personal and romantic life. Throughout the documentary, he meets different women that he starts to develop feelings for, but time and again, the feelings would not be reciprocated.

Ross McElwee and the women he falls for are just constantly not being on the same page. So for the hypothetical DVD booklet, I decided to play with this idea of "not being on the same page" by having different articles and trains of thoughts running side-by-side on the spreads, only lining up like a regular spread once in a while.

The articles are differentiated by different typefaces (sans serif vs. serif), different typographic alignment (left-aligned vs. fully justified centered blocks of text), and subtle background color (white vs. yellow).

A group of friends and I decided to do a Summer Publication Club where we all create our own publication to send and trade to each other over the summer.

"Catch Me If You—" is my publication featuring a curation of different stories and articles about imposter syndrome, including an original piece of writing on one of my own experiences with the psychological phenomenon. The publication is a literal case study on the subject with different examples wrapped up together in a vanilla folder.

The title is reference to the film Catch Me If You Can about the real life Frank Abagnale, one of the most famous imposters ever who actually did get away with many huge cons. However, the title for my publication is cut off to reflect what all those with imposter syndrome fears—that we won't get away with our act and will soon be caught and revealed to be frauds after all.

For twenty-nine seasons, Grand Performances has been bringing together hundreds of thousands of people in downtown Los Angeles with one of the biggest free summer concert series. Our design for the 2015 brochure made it very simple and clear: Grand Performances provides the free concerts; you bring your family, friends, and a grand attitude.