New York-based graphic designer Raina Redcross develops her Parsons Communication Design thesis into an editorial, motion and wearable project that translates biological mimicry into a visual language, using distortion, material layering and image manipulation to construct visuals where meaning shifts with perception.
Mimicry in nature is a survival strategy: camouflage, colour shifting, behavioural display, the organism adapting its appearance to what the environment needs it to look like in order to persist. Raina Redcross became interested in what it would mean to treat that as a language, and what it would look like when translated into graphic design.
Coexistent Language began as her Parsons Communication Design thesis, shaped by visual research into the work of Cho Giseok and Sean Brady alongside a research seminar that introduced her to biological and biosemiotic texts. The project developed from the observation that mimetic tactics operate as a shared language between biological systems and human culture, from fashion and performance to cosmetic transformation. The same strategies of display, distortion and adaptation that a cephalopod uses to disappear into a reef appear, in different forms, in how human culture constructs and shifts identity.
The outcome spans editorial, motion and wearable forms. The editorial work uses material layering, distortion and image manipulation to build graphic experiments that represent different types of biological mimicry, employing mimetic tactics like shock value, visual jolt and transformation. Body-based visuals explore adaptivity through display and shifting identity, constructed from acetate. Motion pieces extend the system into time-based work. Throughout, the viewer is positioned not as a passive observer but as part of the system being observed: meaning is not fixed but emerges through the interaction between perception and image.
“I tend to follow what feels unresolved in my work,” Redcross says. “That’s usually where the most interesting ideas come from.” The instability is the point. “Spending time in nature always leads me to see things differently,” she adds. “There’s always something to reinterpret.”
Raina Redcross is a New York-based graphic designer working across art direction, editorial, branding and web design, building immersive systems across print, screen and space.
Website: rainaredcross.com Instagram: @rainatypes
Coexistent Language, 2025. Parsons School of Design Communication Design thesis. Editorial, motion and wearable forms.
