Rhys

Hello! Happy to see you. This is your gift! I hope you enjoy it and find some use for it, maybe as a toy for your child (or yourself), maybe as something cool you see once and put away, maybe as an introspective reminder that feelings are complex and difficult and that's amazing. On the rest of this website you will find descriptions of each of the sixteen figures I have gifted you and a small history of the designer who created them. Now, as for the personal aspect of why I'm giving this to you... you made it very difficult to find information on who you were and what you liked. Fortunately, OSU's Design Department had an interview with you highlighting your graduate student studies, and this is where I found out the three most important aspects (for gift giving) about you:

1. Your personal focus on recyclability, sustainability, and the future of America and the environment.

2. Your Visual Communications study path.

3. "I investigate things like how designers can use storytelling..."

Aiming to reflect all of these within the gift you have been given was difficult, but this solution made it possible, albeit avant-garde. Assuming you've been surrounded by environmental-centered ideas these past years, making a project focusing on that would only highlight my surface-level knowledge of the topic and likely make you laugh at my ignorance. Instead, keeping this in mind, this project was made entirely from 100% recyclable materials already available to me and my close design friends. Everything in the gift is a reused, once excess material that would've just been thrown away if not falling into my hands. Finally, combining the last two points, what better way to tell a story than through pantomime? The epitome of visual communication and story telling, no words, no prompts, no in-your-face-ness, just pure storytelling. Storytelling in the most raw, most fundamental way possible, or at least an interpretation of it.

Thank you for being my gift recipient and for being so patient with me and answering my strange, strange questions. I hope this let's you crack a smile.

Mychajlo "Mylo" Johnson.7643