2017

Riley Yankowich ’18, new media design major

A design of two hands reaching for each other—one of them human, one built from bits of technical parts—is the winning entry from this year’s Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival poster contest.

Riley Yankowich, a third-year new media design student from Deerfield Beach, Fla., created the image and will receive $500 in Tiger Bucks as her prize. Five thousand 14-by-20-inch copies of her design will be printed and distributed to visitors for free outside The Wallace Center during the festival on May 6, 2017.

“It’s pretty cool my artwork will be displayed on campus,” Yankowich said. “I’m pretty excited.”

She entered the contest as a class project, never thinking her design would be selected.

“There was a lot of brainstorming in class,” she said. “I originally was going to do something like man versus machine, but the idea kept going back to hands and it formed into all the tools students use, with a human hand reaching out to them. And it shows humans always have a power over the tools that they are using.”

Yankowich had four weeks to complete the design, which included an all-nighter towards the deadline when she used Photoshop and touched up 3D-rendered icons on the lower hand in her design.

“I was not expecting to win,” she said. “I just wanted to make a cool poster.”

Nearly 50 entries were received for the contest.

Runner up was a design by Amy Pham, a new media design major from Sunnyvale, Calif., who designed an image of RIT President Bill Destler’s head unscrewed, allowing items such as a joystick, Rubik’s Cube, hockey puck, gears and a banjo to pop out.