CREATE

This year we decided to keep the event digital in order to make it as accessible as possible. People who might have been too busy or too far away to make it to Tyler are now able to hop on zoom and meet our students. It’s also more manageable, as all that’s needed is the zoom room link to connect students and reviewers together.

Each team role was decided upon by our client and art director, Abby Guido, following individual interviews. This allowed for the members of the team to not only act as designers, but to split up the work and focus on different individual parts of the project.
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As the team's Design Manager, I was responsible for collecting and presenting each team member’s design contributions while also leading brainstorming sessions. My goal was to help steer our team's ideas into a cohesive visual direction that could be adapted into a versatile system.
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Marina, our Lead Strategist, researched similar events and looked into feedback received from previous CREATE events. Sydney, our Production Manager, was responsible for setting up our cloud storage on OneDrive complete with an organized naming system in place. Our project manager, Vivian, organized which tasks we would need to complete during the course of the project and set deadlines according to progress made from week-to-week. Brynn, our Client Manager was responsible for writing down design feedback and other notes each week.

In our creative brief, we went over what our goals for this event were. We wanted to create a brand that would catch the attention of alumni and creative professionals and make them excited to engage with the GAID’s 2023 graduating class. Our online campaign had to stand out in order to motivate people to participate in the event and interact with students. We also wanted to make it clear that our peers are talented, hardworking individuals who are eager to begin their careers in the design industry.
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At the beginning of this endeavor, Sydney set up our naming conventions and OneDrive cloud-saving system with our team. Vivian and I worked together to create our deadlines for collateral. Marina also began to research with Grace on the design work done from past CREATE projects and similar events to set expectations on our scope and what deliverables we would be producing for the rest of the semester.
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Our first brainstorming session, led by me, largely focused on different concept ideas. In this process, we talked about what this event meant to the graduating GAID class and what our place in the design community was. The initial ideas that came out of this process were “branching out”, “design in motion”, and “design and conquer”. Marina researched logos with similar concepts or themes and made a presentation for the group to help us get inspiration, which we used to further develop these concepts.

Following this, we broke into groups of three to explore logos that related to each concept before coming back together to discuss what ideas we liked and what we felt was the strongest going forward. After a couple more brainstorming sessions, we settled on our “branching out” concept and focused on logos that conveyed the idea of moving fully into the professional design sphere and expanding our horizons. The three visual concepts that we felt connected to this concept were “void letters”, “constellation text”, and “arrows”, as shown above.
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Our team liked the starburst shapes from our constellation concept and the use of shapes as a frame from the void letters concept and decided to merge these elements together in order to form a logo that represents both ideas.

Following finishing up our style tile and initial save the date post, we needed to collect student information and headshots. Grace, our event planner, was responsible for setting up student forms and spreadsheets that collected student work, reviewing preferences, zoom links, bio information, and headshot time slot information. A photo day was held where each team member would track who had gotten their photo taken and make sure they filled out other forms beforehand. Sam Fritch would take professional photos of students before sending the files to the team, where we would edit and stylize the photos according to our brand.
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We decided upon a photo treatment that involved a system of four different alternating frame styles. Our shapes accentuate each student in a unique way. We used our lightest color, chartreuse, to accent the students' names. These posts were carefully crafted to ensure everyone's name would be optimally readable and fit within the frame structure. The background colors were individually chosen to ensure each student would stand out clearly.

When it came to creating our website, we continued to design with the goal of making our brand pop while also making it easy for students and other visitors to navigate. The home page promotes both CREATE and CONNECT, featuring both of their logos at the top of the page. It includes buttons that make it easy to navigate to each event’s respective page, which goes further into detail on what each event is about. CREATE’s page primarily includes a button that leads to the reviewer sign-up form. The student portfolio pages stay consistent with our Instagram campaign by utilizing the same stylized photo grid. Viewers can click on a student’s headshot to learn more about them and their work.

After changing the GAID profile picture on Instagram to our CREATE logo, we began our social media takeover. Following the finalization of our photo treatment, collecting all student work, and collaborating with our social media assistant, we planned out a detailed schedule of when each student profile would be uploaded. Each student would have six examples of their work in their post, with their personal bio and tags included. We also planned out our “WE ARE” reels that showcased certain categories of student work such as typography, UX/UI design, poster design, etc.

Our team also used MailChimp, where we would set up branded emails to further reach out to potential reviewers for the virtual portfolio event. After collecting all the information from the forms we sent out, the team then personally matched students to reviewers based on the time slots available and interests or specialties listed.

Because our event was online, we did the virtual equivalent of decorating the space by making a custom set of zoom backgrounds.

In conclusion, the project succeeded through effective communication, planning, and design work done by our team. The end result was a campaign that was loved and embraced by not only our graduating class, but by the expansive audience we were able to captivate on social media. We had a total of 137 reviewers sign up for our event, meaning all our participating students were able to meet with six reviewers as we had hoped. In fact, we had so many people sign up we had to group up individuals from similar companies.
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Overall, each of us grew tremendously as designers and team members by working together to create a memorable and cohesive visual identity and strategically implementing it throughout multiple channels. By supporting each other through creative and technical problems, we were able to construct a prosperous campaign that went above and beyond.