Editor’s note: This is the first installment of variety writer Katie Andrew’s weekly profile of an Athens artist.

While the rest of the world thinks in dollars and cents, Kevan Williams thinks in blueprints and brush strokes. Landscape architecture student by day and painter by night, Williams can leave his creative mark on just about any surface.

“[Painting] is a nice break from landscape architecture classes, which are much more applied,” he said. “I did a project this semester that looked at how you could use media in a way that is audience-specific. Most planning projects come at people in a sort of professional way – very formal and official. Since Athens is such an artist-centric place, you could use that as a language for communicating planning concepts.”

For the project, Williams combined art with architecture to create a community concept that interacted with residents.

“I made seed packets and, rather than spelling out how to plant the plant, the back of the seed packet showed a specific place – like a median in the street or something like that,” Williams said. “The idea was that if you put these packets in everyone’s mailbox around [that place], it tells people not what to plant, but where to plant it. Then hopefully they will.”

Another portion of the project involved advertising local artwork in a unique way for a unique purpose.

“I took a set of 10 local artist landmarks and made them into postcards, which Nuci’s Space sold as a fundraiser,” he said. “The landmarks I had chosen typically didn’t have any official historic preservation status, so if you mass produced them, people will see these images and think the fact that it’s on a postcard means it’s an important landscape. It’s an assumption people make about postcards.”

Williams said these experiments were successful.

“I got a lot out of it and I think it will inform things I do later on.”

An advocate of sustainable community design, Williams encourages Athens residents to take part in making decisions that affect their environments. Like any other art form, landscape design is plagued by a fear of creating that seems to affect a majority of the population.

“When you’re working with community design and things like that, people are very hesitant to take over and start drawing for themselves,” he said. “But given the right tools, everyone can do it.”

When he graduates next year, Williams plans to attend graduate school for architecture so that he may continue studying ways to design communities to compliment the local landscape.

“I’m really interested in vernacular architecture,” he said. “All the buildings around here don’t really look like they’re from here – they could be built anywhere. [Lamar Dodd] is a concrete and steel structure, but it’s wrapped in brick just so that it matches an aesthetic.

Whereas, if you go to Five Points or Boulevard, all the houses are much more a part of the area,” said Williams. “Older houses are much more sustainable because they’re designed for that place. That really interests me.”