RAYA FREEBORN

Created and authored a perfect-bound recipe book featuring original recipes and personal insights, focusing on the experience and setting where the food is enjoyed rather than just the recipes themselves.

The design emphasizes storytelling, atmosphere, and trial-and-error, inviting readers to savor both the culinary and emotional connections to each dish.

Exploring how meaning shifts when information is translated through systems. This ‘translation machine’ chops sandwich recipes apart into a simple game.

Making pizza...

A series of three A2-sized posters featuring original photographs taken throughout Italy. The collection highlights the striking angularity of Italian architecture, emphasizing its geometric elegance, structural beauty, framing, and the creative use of angles in design.

Authored a 500-page book exploring themes of consumption and digestion through materials, writings, imagery, and condiments, all creatively packaged within the format of a sandwich.

This work pairs with the recipe book Food for Thought, offering a conceptual dive into food, experience, and the symbolic layers of eating.

Instructional system designed for outdoor awareness and mapping.

This project began during finals week, with a fish tank I couldn’t keep alive and a feeling of losing control. What I could maintain was my dad’s old bike: cleaning it, fixing it, keeping it going. That small routine became grounding.

Printed onto transparent bike spoke cards is Lucas Winzenburg’s essay, Debt of Disrepair: An Ode to Maintenance. The project turns maintenance into a feedback loop: neglect makes the message unreadable, while care brings clarity. The design only works if you care for it. Maintenance doesn’t just preserve the message. It is the message. Activated through a ride and shared repairs with the Bike Club @VCU, maintenance becomes attention, commitment, and practice.

Inspired by fish, the dragons from 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom', and the red line in the 'Indiana Jones' series, BONES is a 48x8” accordion book featuring original photographs of rock arrangements in the Mojave Desert.

The rocks are composed to resemble the skeletal remains of a fish, with ribs and body evoking a sense of decay and natural artistry, presented through a seamless line of continuation.