lucasjin
interfaces, software and images —
about how what we make changes how we see…
scroll or use ← → to move through the work · click to pick one up
interfaces, software and images —
about how what we make changes how we see…
scroll or use ← → to move through the work · click to pick one up
A participant holds a webcam whose live feed is split across two screens: a digital display renders it as ASCII characters, while a CRT monitor shows the same feed as degraded video, with frames held and dropped, jitter, color offset and scanlines tuned live. The same moment appears both as text and as failing analog signal.
Your camera image stays in this browser: it is not uploaded or recorded. It stops when you leave this page.
An Instagram-style feed scrolls on its own; viewers slow it only by repeatedly dragging against it, and it speeds back up as soon as they let go. Holding it fully still reveals “Attention Is All You Need.” Completed as a multi-screen installation.
A working Android app that sends simulated notifications at unpredictable intervals, some of them invisible. Each swipe brings the next one sooner, while ignoring them slows them down, so the participant’s own habit of dismissing sets the pace of the interruptions.
A Flutter app combining a to-do list, journal, watchlist and grocery list, synced across devices through Google Drive. Before uploading, it downloads and merges the other device’s changes, and it keeps a record of deleted items so a deletion isn’t undone by an older copy. Includes dark mode and six interface languages; runs on Android and Windows.
Turn-by-turn navigation gets you there without teaching you the city. This concept treats navigation as a learning problem as well: guidance fades as you repeat routes in an area, shifting from turn-by-turn prompts to major roads, landmarks and direction, so the streets you know light up in orange. Los Angeles first; a concept with no backend or real data yet.
Further down the page is the concept itself: all 19 screens, live and clickable.
Long-exposure photographs of smartphone light moving through space, taken at five times of day from before dawn to evening, each presented as a video of the still image with accompanying sound.
Long-exposure photographs taken in darkness with the phone screen as the only light: the screen smears into a blank glowing rectangle, while the hands holding it, and at times the face looking into it, appear only where its light reaches.
Exhibited in the ART 485 capstone exhibition, Helen Topping Architecture & Fine Arts Library, USC, May 2026.
A scroll-driven product page for a smartwatch: as the viewer scrolls, the watch stays fixed while four lifestyle scenes (outdoors, running, health, formal wear) change behind it, each with its own color and copy. Built with stock photography.
Extends a three-spread watch editorial made for DES 302: Design III in March 2024.
A conceptual identity for a performance-art studio and bar in Palm Springs that runs workshops and café hours by day and performances by night. Deliverables include a logo, a poster set (open-stage nights, artist residency, event calendar) and a style guide built on a chosen typeface.
Imagines skis as an Apple product, applying the company’s visual language across a poster, a billboard and a product web page (“SKi 15 Pro”), with bright gradient skis and a “Full Color, Full Fun” campaign line.
A poster for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, built around the name split into “Sun” and “dance”: the first half tilted on a film camera shape, the second set large over loose cut-paper forms. The layout is then tried in a range of colour schemes and shown as a street banner.
An instructional website on skiing technique, designed as a narrative that moves from first steps to carving.
A campaign concept pointing students to quiet, green spaces hidden just off USC’s main routes, as a place to rest during stressful weeks, using my own photographs of the sites. Not commissioned or deployed.
An identity for a fictional energy drink, including a logo, color palette and applications across packaging-related graphics and merchandise mockups.
A study of letterforms found in everyday surroundings, photographed and composed into a typographic piece.
A single-channel video composed as four vertical, phone-shaped panels: in each, I sit or stand still in a meditative pose while social media feeds scroll across and through my body in translucent layers. The work treats endless scrolling as a kind of meditation for a generation raised on social media, one that produces calm through the screen rather than away from it.
Human figures in street footage are cut out and replaced with online comments, so a crowd of people becomes a crowd of text, showing online discourse overwhelming the individual. Incorporates original, stock, and found footage.
A completed series of 11 short videos, each isolating the moment of taking out a phone and opening social media in an ordinary setting (a stairwell, an elevator, the library, waiting for class), published on the platform whose pull the series examines.
Published on TikTok (@dailyscreencreatu).
A magazine feature interpreting a classmate’s story about her bond with her dog, Mac, built from black-and-white photographic fragments, overlapping imagery, strong tonal contrast and expressive typography; part of a class magazine.
A physical book about sleep and dreams, wrapped in cloth that recalls bedsheets and pillows, with transparent pages and overlapping printed text that make the reading itself feel layered and dreamlike.
A skiing zine printed on semi-transparent and glossy papers, where the layering of pages and imagery becomes part of the reading experience.
A group magazine on nostalgia for older technology (Polaroids, vinyl records, vintage camera filters).
A zine on the typeface EB Garamond that sets it in the format of an academic essay, with title, body, citations and formatting, to explore the formal yet hand-drawn quality of the type.
A movable changing-room frame with its curtain replaced by clear tarp, which visitors step inside. The soft-edged, see-through enclosure gives physical form to the invisible bubble we look out from when we see the world through a phone screen; in critique, visitors described feeling exposed and newly aware of themselves inside it.
A live performance builds the work: each time I press the shutter on an Android phone, I place a print of a different image into a grid of around 100 small prints laid out on a table as a life-size phone camera roll. The album is imagined as starting empty and never ending, turning the reflex of capturing and storing images into a physical ritual.
One hundred handmade single clay AirPods, lined up like a production line beside a case holding just one, on how normal it has become to lose a single earbud and leave it behind, each one carrying a battery and non-biodegradable materials.
