Dora Godfrey’s layered and saturated graphic design is organised chaos

Singapore-born designer Dora Godfrey just graduated from Yale School of Art with a masters in graphic design, and believes this combination of environments has informed her aesthetic. Abundant layers of information and saturated colours come together for hugely energetic visuals, dense with texture yet acutely impactful.

“I grew up in a very crowded but regulated and organised environment,” says Dora, “and this is perhaps the most evident in the methodology that I’ve adopted – systematically collecting, recording and archiving.

“When I consider the vocabulary of colour in my work, I credit the dense and highly pigmented scheme that I work within to the equatorial climate of South East Asia. Growing up in year-round heat and humidity, the way I’ve been conditioned to see colour has always been through subjects presented under strong sunlight, saturated, sweltering and shiny.”
 
The works are curated chaos, “a visual haze of disorder,” with a sophisticated element of control. The cover design for Sum Total is a collage of nature guides depicting the land contours of Singapore. This project also became a billboard for Yale’s MFA thesis show. 

Similarly a poster for a Lucia Allais lecture is a busy composition of collaged images, and more posters for a Yale arts department mixer are a crazy fusion of type and blocky shapes. Load OS is a personal project imagining the photos on her phone as dead pixels, making for a dynamic take on photo collage.