Max Williams – Design Portfolio

Hi there! During the Spring 2025 semester of my senior year at CU Boulder I ran a blog as a part of my Aesthetics of Design course. Throughout the semester I talked about a few different things related to design and in particular the choices and intentions behind them, however, my main focus with this blog was to talk about the two projects I worked on for the class. This post in particular is a summary of my work on those projects, as well as anything else I talked about.

To start we had to choose a personal aesthetic to describe, and I chose the cabin core aesthetic. It was clear then and now that cabin core is my personal favorite aesthetic, with both my upcycle and final project being loosely based around the cabin core concept. Cabin core resonates so deeply with me since the primary focus is connecting back to nature through the comfort of your own home, something that I’ve always done wherever I lived in Colorado.

That brings us to the Upcycle project, where we had to take something old and turn it into something new. I decided that I wanted to take some license plates I had collected over the years and create a way to display them thats better than just using putty to stick them to the wall. So using old repurposed wood and some nails, I created a license plate frame, seen below.

The staggered brick like pattern the plates follow is something I did while the plates hung on the wall with no frame that I liked and wanted to keep through into this project. Overall, I really like how the particle board that supports everything is visible between the plates and through the green paint. The natural elements of the license plates play into that cabin core aesthetic, and the natural wood and grain helps to that effect as well.

For the second and final project of the semester, the restrictions were much more open ended, meaning we could essentially build anything that we could within the time frame. This led to me struggling to come up with an idea until I noticed there were more things in my room than just license plates that could be more effectively displayed. That’s when I remembered some old display stands for Lego minifigures that I had seen online that use a staircase design to show off each figure. Taking this idea and twisting it into my cabin core aesthetic resulted in the stand pictured below. This project did need to have some sort of dynamic element, so I decided to add a drawer in the back to fill out negative space.

Both projects were a lot of fun to make and I think that they turned out pretty well, at least functionally. My personal aesthetics were starting to clash with my artistic abilities at the end of the last project, but I’m still glad I tried to do something new and that it didn’t turn out half bad.