This book was designed for George Brown College’s Ideas and Images class.
The project was to reflect on a topic that is going on in the world that interests me and to translate that into a visual format. Therefore, Toxic Gay Culture became a visual exploration and response to the problematic image and body expectations seen within popular gay dating apps. The book addresses toxic traits such as racism, body standards, hookup culture, masculinity exceptions, and internalized shame by shifting the power away from the person embodying these traits and speaking to what these people are truly saying to the world when they possess them. To convey this visually I used minimal colouring to reference the apps, strategic layout to highlight the illustrations, and textured flat style illustrations to show that even though the problems are seen on apps they have existed long before technology was created.
