LOVE AND HONOR: ATX
PROJECT SCOPE
Promo Design
Graphic Design
THE CHALLENGE
Create and apply a look and feel for a Miami University event hosted in Austin, Texas.
The Brief: Each year, the university travels to a new location and hosts a multitude of different events and tours within one city. It is a chance for alumni in or near that city to connect and experience something unique. Though hosted by Miami, there is flexibility in the branding to allow the pieces created to have a distinct feeling of Austin associated with them. This brand would then be applied across print and digital mediums.
THE SAVE THE DATE
One of the first pieces created for this event was a postcard save the date to people in the Austin area. When looking for inspiration, I found a colorblocked mural there and wanted to use that style. I created a few different options with different combinations of Miami’s band colors.
Postcard Drafts
A problem I ran into with a few of these layouts was struggling to balance the red, blue, and yellow without the design leaning a bit juvenile. Because of this, two right side options resonated more with the client. The final decision was the top right option because it placed more emphasis on the name and date of the event over emphasizing Miami.
Final Postcard
The final card had a few changes made to the front. Once of the elements I kept the same on all of the options was the inclusion of three starts. This event is relatively new, and this was only the third installment of it, so I wanted to honor that. As a finishing touch, parts of this design were coated in a raised varnish to help it stand out in our alumni’s mailboxes.
BUTTONS
When brainstorming ideas for fun promotional items to go along with Love and Honor: ATX, we came up with the concept of unique buttons for each tour we were offering. One major selling point of this weekend is that the alumni can really pick and choose what they want to participate in, so to honor that, I illustrated a button for each tour that would be given out at the event.
Attendees ended up pulling their buttons on their lanyards and bags, and started to look forward to receiving their buttons at each event. Some went as far as asking the staff for pins from tours they didn’t end up attending because they wanted to collect a whole set. The success of this item has lead us to do this in subsequent years.
OTHER DIGITAL APPLICATIONS
Our clients wanted a similar look and feel to what was seen on the postcard to be present on their webpage and emails promoting the event. A few options were created for masthead images and email headers that would still feel cohesive when placed in locations which are branded for Miami.
Social Media
Because the clients loved the illustration of the buttons so much, I had the greenlight to use them on other applications, including our social media posts.
In order to tease the designs of the buttons without sharing them, I took the illustrations and mocked them up to look like stickers sitting on a table. This was used to announce registration had opened.
We then continued to use them as stickers on our posts to highlight the different tours and experiences being offered to alumni. Below are carousels for Instagram.
FINAL PRODUCTS
