WELCOME TO MY ROOM
NEW HAVEN / CT
LAST UPDATED 10/23
My name is Gabby, and I live in a dorm room the size of a shoebox. Most of this work lives on my walls or under my bed.
I grew up in Manila and currently study graphic design (among many other things) at Yale. My practice largely explores the hyper-personal, the handmade and the ephemeral, and I’m interested in design as a tool for building community and in reimagining more mindful and personal alternatives to our current design systems. I also like making people laugh. On campus, I’m a graphic design assistant at the Yale Center for British Art, Head of Creative at 17o1 Records and Design at Yale Co-President, and I spent my last summer illustrating for Bode.
I personally see design as the materialization of love and attention. It’s kind of like building a cathedral: to design is to carve out space and time for something outside of yourself in hopes that it will outlive you.
It’s very nice to meet you!
WARDROBE IN PROGRESS
ONGOING
Ready-made pieces that I’ve reworked to be infinitely added to, mended and worn over and over and over again. What does it mean to create a garment that grows with the wearer and accumulates as opposed to loses significance over time? How might we reimagine a fashion system that honors memory, the hyper-personal and the ephemeral?
YELLOW THINGS
SPRING 2023
A zine of all the yellow things in my room.
16 pages, 2 color risograph.
16 pages, 2 color risograph.
Branding and creative direction for 17o1 Records, Yale’s only record label dedicated to the production, promotion and performance of original student music. Website developed by Evan Kirkiles through Design at Yale.
In Fall 2023, my friends and I resurrected 17o1 Records from an eight-year hiatus. I redesigned the 17o1 identity by taking inspiration from the world of amateur music itself — think punk fanzines, the flyers you hand-draw for your friend’s grungy basement party and music posters plastered all over a dorm wall. The challenge was to use old-school, lo-fi methods of creating and disseminating to create an intimate and ephemeral listening experience, and yet craft a (somewhat) practical design strategy well-adapted to the age of social media and the shoestring budget that student clubs run on. We’re really just a bunch of scrappy college students running a scrappy record label, and I wanted our brand identity to embrace that.
As Head of Creative, I design for the record label itself. I also lead a team of nine designers, photographers and social media managers who mostly work one-on-one with our signed artists.
In Fall 2023, my friends and I resurrected 17o1 Records from an eight-year hiatus. I redesigned the 17o1 identity by taking inspiration from the world of amateur music itself — think punk fanzines, the flyers you hand-draw for your friend’s grungy basement party and music posters plastered all over a dorm wall. The challenge was to use old-school, lo-fi methods of creating and disseminating to create an intimate and ephemeral listening experience, and yet craft a (somewhat) practical design strategy well-adapted to the age of social media and the shoestring budget that student clubs run on. We’re really just a bunch of scrappy college students running a scrappy record label, and I wanted our brand identity to embrace that.
As Head of Creative, I design for the record label itself. I also lead a team of nine designers, photographers and social media managers who mostly work one-on-one with our signed artists.
IT WAS IMPORTANT TO ME THAT OUR DIGITAL EXPERIENCES RETAINED THE TACTILITY, INTIMACY AND SCRAPPINESSS OF A HAND-DRAWN POSTER.
POST(ER) ARCHIVE. I HAND-DRAW THESE ON LETTER-SIZE PAPER AND SCAN THEM IN TO MAKE OUR INSTAGRAM POSTS - NO DIGITAL BRUSHES ALLOWED!
WOODY’S WINGS SPONSORSHIP CAMPAIGN.
WE HELD A LAUNCH CONCERT IN A FRIEND’S BACKYARD! WITH OVER 500 GUESTS IN ATTENDANCE, WE EVENTUALLY GOT SHUT DOWN BY THE COPS BECAUSE OF NOISE COMPLAINTS.
THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS: AN EXPERIMENT IN INSTUTIONAL AMNESIA
FALL 2O23
INSPIRED BY THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
FULL BOOK HERE
The worst thing about going to Yale is that one day you won’t anymore. One day in May I’m going to wake up and lose swipe access to the opposite of loneliness itself, and all I will have to show for the happiest years of my life so far will be a sad piece of paper and a sadder piece of plastic with an embarrassing photo from high school.
This project is my attempt to cope with my premature grief at leaving this place. From picnic blankets out on Cross Campus to the walk of shame back home from Bass, I created posters that seek to memorialize shared experiences deeply specific to Yale College — the good, the bad, the infuriating, the spiritually awakening, the acutely, heart-wrenchingly cringeworthy and above all the opposite of lonely. My posters invite you to come and draw anything (yes, anything) on the walls of this campus, without anyone’s permission. To leave your mark, if only for a little while, on an institution physically and systemically designed to forget you.
This experiment didn’t last very long. Despite my best efforts to track them down and keep them up, many of my posters didn’t last more than a day. Some were simply thrown in the trash. To no one’s surprise, Yale is very, very protective of its walls — even when what one puts on the wall is something of a love letter to Yale itself, when freshmen write we’ll be okay and seniors write I love you and when strangers reach out on Instagram to tell me that they read one of my posters in its entirety and felt a sense of connection or comfort somehow. But maybe that’s exactly the point: our college years are ours and only ours, and they are so cruelly and beautifully short. Maybe that’s what makes them so special.
This experience was, among other things: a semi-public art project, a social experiment, an act of civil disobedience, an act of self-care, an expression of grief, an exercise in futility and the materialization of my childish and irrational urge to scribble my name all over the walls of this campus in crayon. All I have left of it is the handful of posters I managed to salvage, this imperfect and intensely redacted record of my (failed) battle with the Yale bureaucracy, and half a pack of red solo cups.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness. At least we have this.
This project is my attempt to cope with my premature grief at leaving this place. From picnic blankets out on Cross Campus to the walk of shame back home from Bass, I created posters that seek to memorialize shared experiences deeply specific to Yale College — the good, the bad, the infuriating, the spiritually awakening, the acutely, heart-wrenchingly cringeworthy and above all the opposite of lonely. My posters invite you to come and draw anything (yes, anything) on the walls of this campus, without anyone’s permission. To leave your mark, if only for a little while, on an institution physically and systemically designed to forget you.
This experiment didn’t last very long. Despite my best efforts to track them down and keep them up, many of my posters didn’t last more than a day. Some were simply thrown in the trash. To no one’s surprise, Yale is very, very protective of its walls — even when what one puts on the wall is something of a love letter to Yale itself, when freshmen write we’ll be okay and seniors write I love you and when strangers reach out on Instagram to tell me that they read one of my posters in its entirety and felt a sense of connection or comfort somehow. But maybe that’s exactly the point: our college years are ours and only ours, and they are so cruelly and beautifully short. Maybe that’s what makes them so special.
This experience was, among other things: a semi-public art project, a social experiment, an act of civil disobedience, an act of self-care, an expression of grief, an exercise in futility and the materialization of my childish and irrational urge to scribble my name all over the walls of this campus in crayon. All I have left of it is the handful of posters I managed to salvage, this imperfect and intensely redacted record of my (failed) battle with the Yale bureaucracy, and half a pack of red solo cups.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness. At least we have this.
POSTERS INSTALLED SITE-SPECIFICALLY AROUND YALE — WORDS CHANGE WITH LOCATION. DEFACEMENT FROM FRIENDS AND STRANGERS ENCOURAGED.
SELECTED POSTERS
33” X 48” EACH
I RECORDED EVERY CONVERSATION PERTAINING TO MY POSTERS OVER THE SPAN OF A WEEK IN A 76 PAGE BOOK AND HID COPIES ALL OVER YALE. CONTAINS TEXT MESSAGES, INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS, ART SUPPLY STORE RECEIPTS, NOTES, SCANNED YDN ARTICLES, REDACTED INFORMATION AND ANNOTATIONS FROM FRIENDS AND STRANGERS.
76 PAGES
5.5” X 8.5”
EDITION OF 10
PRINTED AT TYCO PRINTING
DESIGNED USING MICROSOFT WORD AND A SCANNER
