ARTHURUndergraduate Thesis
At a young age, my brother, Arthur, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ever since then, our dynamic has been complicated. I didn’t have the typical white picket fence with a ‘normal’ mom, dad, and brother- my dynamic was ‘abnormal’. At the time, it caused a boatload of issues within myself and drastically damaged my relationship with my family. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve looked back when I was younger and realized my faults. The goal of this project is to show how my brother’s disorder contributed to my development and to humanize his ASD.
Despite the visibility in recent years, public understanding of autism often remains rooted in stigma, misinformation, and the desire to ‘fix’ autistic individuals rather than support them. This general public idea of autism is due to inadequate education and awareness; it actively prevents autistic people from receiving meaningful support that allows them to thrive. Instead of being understood as a different way of experiencing the world, autism is frequently framed as a deficit or problem to be cured.
A major part of the conversation surrounding autism focuses on diagnosis, treatment, and behavioral correction rather than personhood. Research such as Taylor et al. (2025) demonstrates how traits commonly attributed to autism, such as heightened creativity, are often misunderstood or incorrectly generalized, sometimes being more closely associated with co-occurring conditions like ADHD. This highlights a gap between scientific findings and how autism is perceived in everyday life. My own family experience reflects this disconnect. My father was not diagnosed with ASD until adulthood due to a lack of awareness and resources, demonstrating how generational misunderstandings continue to affect autistic individuals. Similarly, autistic people are often discussed in institutional settings — schools, therapy offices, research studies — more as subjects of observation than as whole human beings.
To properly achieve humanizing autism, I believe the most important factor is to personalize it to my own experience with my brother, Arthur. Given how extensive ASD is, the disorder being considered a ‘spectrum’, it’s incredibly easy to generalize ASD and turn it into a medical article (this is the LAST thing I want to achieve here). By adding my own personal experiences to the project, the book allows me to illustrate Arthur’s personality and how his experience with ASD changed as he grew up. Of course, ASD is a driving theme throughout the novel, but the point of the book is to show that at the end of the day Arthur is a normal person like everyone else.
Another important aspect to note is that I’d like to use this book as a means of processing my own complicated childhood. My childhood has been so out of the norm that I’ve had therapists tell me that they can’t even help me with the issues that I have. By writing about my childhood, I’ll be able to find the good within the complicated mess it was. Of course, I don’t want this to define the ENTIRE thesis, but I do want my experience to be a background theme throughout it. There isn’t a lot of media that details how ASD can impact siblings, and I’d like to create something that a niche group of people could relate to.
First things first, I had to ensure that all of my facts were straight on ASD. ASD is a developmental condition that affects communication, behavior, and social interaction, and it exists on a wide spectrum, meaning you cannot directly compare one person to another.
To begin this process, I started by interpreting my mother’s notes about Arthur’s initial diagnosis. The main reason why I did this was to specify my research to Arthur, since ASD’s spectrum is so broad. She wrote absolutely everything she could about his diagnosis and what was to come as he grew up. By looking at her notes, I was able to structure the rest of my research. That being said, I then looked at multiple collegiate articles and research studies. This research mainly filled in the gaps and helped explain what different sections of my mother’s notes actually meant.
Before writing the actual story, I also wanted to gather images to jog my memory about my childhood. Given how complicated everything was, it was difficult to truly pinpoint how I felt at a young age. With a quick text asking for baby photos, my mother responded almost immediately, and I was able to look through my entire life up until now.
Looking through these older images made it much easier for me to reflect and write about my childhood. It also felt kind of surreal. Having easier access to these memories allowed me to properly develop my story on Arthur in a much more in-depth way. Throughout the writing process, my goal was to remain as honest as possible. A huge part of being human is honesty, and the last thing I wanted was for my brother to seem abnormal in any way. I wanted readers to interpret that honesty as a human quality and move away from any sort of “medical textbook” feeling.
To support this, I structured the story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This approach improves accessibility and also illustrates a clear progression in my personal development. While writing, I was also nervous about the book being interpreted as sad or whiny. Life is a balance of negativity and positivity, so I wanted to reflect that balance throughout the project.
Once the writing was completed, I began working on the imagery and layout. For imagery, I maintained a relatively cohesive color palette of deeper blues because those colors felt the most nostalgic to me. If there was a newer image, I deliberately degraded it using Gaussian blur and noise to replicate a 2000s family photo. Aside from photographs, I also experimented with incorporating Arthur’s sketches. Arthur, like me, is incredibly interested in drawing, and his sketches even show basic principles of design. I found this especially interesting because of how similarly we both approach drawing, so including his work felt important.
As for the layout, the process started relatively simple. I began by laying out the images and text, then added Arthur’s sketches to create more dynamic compositions. One of my main design goals was to balance editorial structure with experimental elements. The structured, gridded images contrast nicely with the more chaotic nature of his sketches.
Finally, once the book’s content was complete, I worked on both the front and back covers. Designing these last allowed me to focus on the overall theme of the book and represent it more cohesively. For the front cover, there was a lot of back and forth with my professor. Initially, I wanted to use a compilation of Arthur’s sketches with his name in the forefront, but I was told it gave off the impression of something much darker than intended. Because of this, I took a different approach.
Since a cover is meant to preview the content of a book, I took that idea more literally by cutting apart different images and collaging them together. I kept the blue color theme to match the rest of the book and maintain that nostalgic feeling. With the addition of large type and the collage, I was able to create a front cover that better represented the project. For the back cover, I pushed the collage concept even further. It ended up reflecting how childhood memories often feel, fragmented, layered, and nostalgic.
Overall, this project reshaped how I understand my childhood. I began with a largely negative perspective, defined by sadness, anger, and other difficult emotions. However, revisiting photographs from those years revealed a more layered reality. The images surfaced moments of warmth and connection that I had either overlooked or forgotten, allowing me to recognize that my childhood was not defined solely by hardship, but also by resilience and quiet joy.
By structuring the narrative from early childhood through my college years, Arthur became a meaningful conclusion to my undergraduate experience. It offered a way to process personal history while acknowledging the role my brother played in shaping who I am. Growing up alongside him pushed me to develop emotional awareness and empathy at an early age—qualities that now inform both my personal life and my creative practice.
From a design perspective, Arthur pushed me beyond my comfort zone in deliberate ways. I moved past simply applying editorial conventions and instead used them as tools to reinforce the emotional arc of the project. For example, I intentionally varied pacing through shifts in image scale, white space, and sequencing—slowing the viewer down in more introspective moments and creating density in sections tied to emotional tension. Typography was treated not just as a vessel for text, but as a narrative device: restrained and consistent in reflective passages, and more fragmented or disrupted when mirroring instability in memory. Material decisions, such as paper choice and layout structure, were also used to echo themes of fragility and reconstruction. By aligning these design choices with the content, I was able to create a more cohesive and immersive experience—one that reflects both the complexity of memory and my growth as a designer.
Instructor: Nathan Young