NIHILIST’S
COFFEE TABLE

Senior Capstone

SPRING 2025

SENIOR
CAPSTONE

BOOK DESIGN/BRAND IDENTITY

Nihilist’s Coffee Table is a handmade series of experimental flipbooks, exploring themes of immateriality, spectacle, violence, and power, while parodying the purchase of coffee-table books as an attempt to signal elite status and intellect.

Cynical or not, I believe coffee table books are not really designed to be read, only flipped through. So I chose to design for this exactly. My two books: “Portrait of Joe”and “Money” featured imagery from the Visible Human Project depicting a death row inmate whose body was systematically sliced and photographed, and an AC-130 performing an “Angel of Death” missile display screenprinted in batches on hundreds of counterfit $100 bills. For additional branding, I screenprinted canvas coffee bags, and totes with the set of Joe’s Mugshot.

Each book was hand fabricated, despite having to edit and manage hundreds of ordered images and simeltaneously. This scale would not have been possible without the many javascript files I created to be able to quickly cycle from digital (Adobe Suite, touch designer, image dithering etc) and and back to analogue (lasercutter, darkroom, embossing press)

This capstone enabled me to research and explore the very subjects that drew me towards visual work, and designs ability to comment on both the strange beauty of the macabre, or unspoken, and the extremes of humanity as a collective.

Portrait of Joe (Front and Back)

Money (Front and Back)

Portrait of Joe (Flip Thru)

Money (Flip Thru)

Portrait of Joe (Dithered Source Frames)

Money (Dithered Source Frames)

Portrait of Joe (Detail of lasercut photo insets)

Money (Detail of lasercut photo insets)

Portrait of Joe (Dithered Mugshot - Page Back)

Portrait of Joe (Blob-Tracking Frames - Diagram - Right facing pages)

Nihilist’s Coffee Table (Desk Display)

Money (Screen 1 of 8 - With corresponding bills )

Money (Top View)

Lasercutting Timelapse

(Covers + Cutting positive/negative letterforms for debossing)

Money (Spine Photo Inset)

Money (Screens 1-5, of 8)

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