Kia Ora,
I’m Ruby Ross-Hayes
yI love the details of design and how small decisions build up to create a bigger picture. I enjoy incorporating tactile elements into my work, particularly as we move further into a digital age, embracing the mistakes and emotion that hands-on design creates. In recent years, this has taken the form of printmaking and bookbinding.
I value communication highly and incorporate this into all areas of my life. I love learning new things, which is why I enjoy working in collaborative environments where you can give and recive constructive feedback, growing together.
Check out my work
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Designed
Dissent
My Honours project, Designed Dissent, is an editorial design project that celebrates Aotearoa’s nuclear-free movement through the protest ephemera it left behind. While researching the history of nuclear-free protests in Aotearoa, I began to uncover a wide range of posters, badges, and other forms of ephemera. I was struck by how clearly these objects demonstrated the relationship between design and protest, and surprised that, as a young designer, I had encountered so little of this material before.
Much of this ephemera was scattered across different online archives, and lacked the sufficient historical or design context, making it difficult to fully understand their significance. This gap became the catalyst for my project. Through editorial design, I brought together the visual language of protest with the historical context, highlighting the role of design in activism. Using bold, uplifting colour, interviews with designers and activists, and a call to create new protest ephemera, the book connects past movements with the present, encouraging young designers to see protest as powerful and relevant today.
This was designed, printed, and bound by myself.
How Spectacular!
How Spectactular! explores the milestones within the invention and evolution of eyeglasses. It was designed for the Milestones brief for the International Society of Typographic Designers Student Assesment scheme. Where it was awarded a Merit.
The main concepts explored in the book are vision, blur and focus. The artefact consists of two Coptic bound small books, joined together with a ribbon. The coptic binding references the hinges of glasses. The books are small and feel delicate, reflecting the small size of glasses and their transportable yet fragile nature. The ribbon that connects the book references the use of ribbon to affix glasses to one’s head before the invention of temple arms. When the artefact is open, it subtly references a pair of glasses, the two books represent the lenses with the ribbon acting as side arms and a nose bridge. On the cover, using a combination of embossing and printing, the word ‘spectacular’ is split to play with the idea of focus and vision.
Book One explores the invention of eyeglasses from 1100 to 1700, while Book Two focuses on eyeglasses from 1800 to the present day. This period followed the Industrial Revolution, which marked a significant turning point in eyeglass development. The two display typefaces used reference the eras covered within the two books.
The sections in the books are split into decades; the display typefaces reflect the decades, and the decade numbers also begin blurred, getting clearer over time, reflecting the developments in eyeglasses. The 0’s in the decades are also connected by a ‘nose bridge’ custom ligature, turning them into glasses.
The book is printed on 80gsm Zeta Paper to incorporate qualities of ‘show through’, playing with the idea of vision. In Book One, on pages 11 and 25, I utilise the transparency of the paper to further explore the idea of bringing things into focus. The top pages only highlight the letters that spell out the type of glasses, while the text underneath provides a few sentences about the invention of the glasses.
The Green Escape
The Green Escape is a month-long campaign in Wellington that is designed to encourage young adults to walk outdoors through gamification, habit-building, and storytelling. The narrative follows the escape of Greenlings from Count Gorse’s grasp, with participants tasked to find them across the city. The campaign includes posters, teaser content, installations, a promotional video, and an app. This was a collaborative project with Zoe Stringer.
Canva Internal Merch Redesign
I worked with two other designers to create new and updated merchandise for the internal Canva Staff during my summer internship as a Brand Designer. This merch was designed to reflect Canva’s creative, fun and playful values, using the Canva core brand colours and tone of voice.
‘You have a great ability to bring fresh and creative ideas to the table, which I saw particularly in the context of the Canva branding and swag direction.’ – Ben McQueen