Not Only for Bodega Cats

A record of how people think while they walk through a convenience store, made public as a can of cat food and a website that lets anyone add their own reading.

Role: Research, posters, packaging, 3D cans, website
Duration: 3 weeks (Sept 2026)
Team: Solo, for RISD Graphic Design Studio 3
Tools: Figma, Blender, HTML/CSS/JS, GitHub Pages

01 The problem

A store is a collection people read with their bodies.

The unit asked one question: how can a designer organize and annotate a collection to create meaning for a specific audience? Every aisle in a convenience store asks a shopper to stop, hurry, or leave, and those small decisions are almost never recorded.

I began by comparing convenience stores across Korea, Japan, the US, and the UK. My professor pushed back on that framing, because “East” and “West” are too general to say anything true. So I stopped comparing countries and turned toward the experience inside one shared store: what people see, what they skip, and what stays hidden from them.

Poster: a thick blue path winds through a dense collage of convenience store photographs, labeled Entrance, Stopping Points, Move Fast, Restricted, and Exit — Poster 1 of the diptych, 24 × 36 in. The path of customer traffic, woven through the collection.

02 Research

Fifty images, sorted by who gets to see them.

The collection holds fifty photographs, screenshots, and signs: storefronts, Slurpee cups, bento trays, lottery walls, restrooms, Yelp pages, and the New York bodega cat. Each one went into one of two groups. Flashy images work as content; a bodega cat belongs in a 24-hour video challenge. Real images stay off social media; the restroom and the register belong to the people who work there.

The layout came from how stores are actually planned: a decompression zone at the door, a long loop around the edges, and the things people came for placed at the back. The collage is not decoration; it is a floor plan made of photographs.

A Japanese 7-Eleven storefront with bicycles parked outside

A tabby bodega cat lying down, cut out from its background

Grocery shelf stacked with jars of pasta sauce and mayonnaise

Buc-ee's website banner advertising gift cards

Black and white photo of an early Texas convenience store with a Did You Know label

Map search results for convenience stores nearby

Line illustration of a convenience store front with people walking past

Promotional photo of the cast of the sitcom Kim's Convenience

Eight of the fifty. The final split was 35 flashy and 15 real.

03 Annotation

Five symbols for the steps of a reaction.

A person enters, stops, moves fast, avoids what is restricted, and leaves. I drew one symbol for each step and placed them directly on the photographs, so intention, hesitation, and avoidance become visible without a single sentence of explanation.

The placement follows a logic. Food gets the open circle, because you stop there to decide which Slurpee flavor is worth it. The cashier gets the double chevron, because you want to leave once you’ve paid. Back rooms get the slash.

EntranceWhere attention starts
Stopping pointSlow down, compare, decide
ExitTime to head out
Move fastHurry past this
RestrictedStaff only

Poster 2: on a bright blue field, a bodega cat built from hundreds of small photo tiles, each stamped with a symbol and a short caption, under a key of the five symbols — Poster 2 of the diptych, 24 × 36 in. The bodega cat, built from 755 tiles of the fifty photographs; every tile carries a symbol and a reason.

Close-up of the cat poster: photo tiles with symbols at their centers and crowded captions such as You'd stop here trying to decide which one is worth getting, and This catches your eye — Close-up. The captions overflow the outline on purpose; a shelf overflows too.

04 Audience

The critique that changed who this was for.

My first posters had two audiences: content creators for the flashy side and store workers for the real side. The critique was direct; the posters didn’t look like they were about the images I had collected. So I rebuilt both posters out of the images themselves, and asked a sharper question about audience.

Who already reacts to this store before they read anything? Cat owners. The bodega cat greets regulars, lounges on displays, and keeps the stockroom clear of mice. A can of cat food is sold in the store, gets picked up and turned over, and comes with a label people read. Its ingredients list became my legend.

Label for the cans: three blue stickers, each with a barcode, a guaranteed analysis panel, an ingredients list made of the five symbols, feeding guidelines, and a strip of the collage and path — Label for the cans. Guaranteed Analysis reads like a real label; the Ingredients list (Entrance, Stopping Points, Exit, Move Fast, Restricted) is the legend. The collage strip continues from can to can when they are stacked.

Animated collage cat running toward the viewer

05 Design response

A website that hands the annotation to everyone else.

The posters are my reading of the collection. The website asks for yours. A visitor taps a photograph, chooses the symbol that matches how they would move through that part of the store, and gets an image they can download or share. There are no wrong answers; the same photo can be a stopping point for one person and an exit for another.

The system stays restrained so the content can stay loud: one blue (#0B4AFF), chosen because cats see blues far more easily than warm colors; white type; and Oswald in three weights, tall and condensed like convenience-store signage. The site is mobile first because the QR flow on the can depends on phones.

Visit the live site (opens in a new tab)

Try it: pick a photo, then pick how you’d move through it.

A bodega cat eating from the can on a convenience store counter — In the store

A cat eating from the can at home while its owner pets it — At home

Three stacked cans on a pet care shelf in a convenience store — On the shelf

06 Results

Three public forms, one system.

A 48 × 36 in diptych: one poster shows the place, a map you walk through with each image used once; the other shows the reaction, a cat built from 755 tiles where every repeat carries a new reason. A sticker sheet that wraps three cans so the collage continues from the top can to the bottom. Tins modeled in Blender down to the score line on the lid, because the structure is what sells it as cat food. And a live website that keeps collecting readings after the critique ends.

50images in the collection

5symbols in the annotation system

755tiles in the cat poster

3public forms: posters, cans, website

07 Challenge

Finding out who the collection was actually for.

The biggest hurdle in the project, and how I got past it.

The hurdle

I started by comparing convenience stores across countries, and my professor pointed out that “East” and “West” were too broad to say anything true. Then my first posters split the work between content creators and store workers, and the critique said they didn’t look like they were about my images at all.

How I got past it

I narrowed the lens to the experience inside one shared store, rebuilt both posters out of the fifty images themselves, and asked who already reacts to a bodega before reading anything: cat owners. That made a can of cat food the object, and its ingredients list the legend.

What it taught me

Two rounds of critique moved the project further than any single idea did. The audience question is worth asking again every time the work changes.

08 Takeaway

Where it succeeds: turning a private habit into a public conversation.

Nobody thinks about how they move through a corner store, which is exactly why it is worth recording. For store owners who keep a bodega cat, the project gives their mascot a product and a reason for regulars to talk about the shop. For cat owners at home, it turns an errand into a small game that travels on social media. For me, it clarified what participation design asks of a designer: build the system carefully, then let go of the answer. Is a collection finished when the collector stops adding to it, or when other people start reading it differently?

For store owners

A mascot product that belongs on their own shelf and brings customers into the conversation.

For cat owners

A reason to look at a familiar place again, and a shareable way to say how they see it.

Test the QR sharing on real phones from the live address, and track which photos draw the most varied answers.