NELL SHER
IDAN 


Nell Sheridan is a Brooklyn-based Californian designer, artist, social media wizard, and middling tennis player– not in any particular order but always all four. She started her design education focusing in fashion with university summer design programs in the years leading up to enrolling at George Washington University to study graphic design in 2019. In 2020 she decided to pursue a larger program and transferred to Boston University where she graduated in May of 2023 with a BFA in Graphic Design.

        Her work experience includes design internships at a prominent New England graphic design and branding firm, a California-based brand consulting start-up, a global healthcare company, a famous Napa wine and spirits label, as well as dozens of freelance design jobs. Nell's most recent and ongoing merchandising, design and social media internship with a multi-location vintage clothing company has reignited her long-held fascination with fashion.

        Her practice focuses on editorial design, branding, fashion, luxury visual merchandising, creative direction, collaboration, and learning everything she possibly can about the world around her. Her dyslexia helps her see the world differently– obsessively noticing details and being fascinated with form and color, and pursuing uniquely creative thinking. 



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Thoughts on Thesis— A Collection of Half Thoughts on a Hopefully Full Thesis


A 120 page publication of research and speculation for what will become my senior thesis (coming May 2023), Printed fall 2022.


I have spent a lot of my time in art school thinking about what “home” means to me and how its definition has changed a lot through my life.

I fluctuate between being obsessed with “home” and dreading the concept. Yet 3.5 years into my college career I realize I’ve fixated on a topic I believe to be as hard to define as the flavor of a color. Trying to pinpoint my identity to a city, place, or 4 sheets of drywall is something I believed to be a prerequisite to finding myself. And i’ve worked on breaking down the “home” by diluting it to a comfort in material possession. In fact Lynn Manzo claims in the article Placeness, Place, Placelessness “that numerous phenomenological interpretations of place have been explored through literal and metaphorical treatments of home.”

But when I almost lost my childhood home to a wildfire, I thought hard about materiality, physical signifiers of home, designing ‘home’, lack of physical home, and how as a graphic designer I can approach this topic through the lens of spatial and web design.

To say home is just a concept, a feeling in the air, or the people you are around. How can one own that? How in a way can that and can Home be the supreme possession?

I asked myself, what is a place? What is a space? And most interestingly —a space that no one belongs to?An airport is designed for max occupancy and is extremely impersonal, an elevator is a space designed to make you want to leave as quickly as possible, an integration room is designed to make you nervous and off balance...


And candle store would be designed to make you feel emotionally close to your own sense of home, same with bars and restaurants (unless they want to make you feel “out of home” because you want something special and unique)

Then It really got me thinking about where our homes are as graphic designers.

Can home be the internet? How do you present yourself, your home page, your public facing feed?

So I thought about “home” in the context of this project and it lead me to my home made notebook.The Notebook ended up becoming a pivital design element of the thesis book as all of its pages were bound into it.