Event Design and Branding

Art Direction: Abby Ryan

Team: Zareen Johnson, Emily Funck, Rebecca Hawkins, Spencer Smith

Overview

Create is a collaborative branding event design project. For this, I worked with four other students to brand the senior portfolio presentation event “Create” for the graduating class of 2020. My role on the team, on top of being a designer, was Lead Strategist. My responsibilities in this position included research and website work.  Take a look at the full case study I wrote on Medium here. 

Invitation 

For the invitation, we designed a trifold with an angle cut to show and reveal different layers of information. This not only conceptually represented our concept “behind the design” but it also made for a more interesting viewing experience for the person receiving the invitation. We included stats about the graduating class to give the invitee a sneak peek into the people they would be meeting if they attended the event.

Unfortunately, just as we finished the invitation and were preparing to send it to the printers, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation. This naturally closed Temple and caused our event to be canceled. We found ourselves in the unique opportunity to create a large digital campaign in lieu of the in-person event that we had originally planned for. 

Social Media Campaign

We released a two-fold social media campaign on Instagram in hopes of getting students’ names and work out to the design community. The first part of this included doing student highlights throughout the month of April. For this, we collected a bio and samples of work from each student graduating and posted it with their portrait both on our feed and in our story. 

The next part of the campaign required help from our amazing alumni. We reached out and asked them to answer questions about portfolios and how to navigate finding jobs. With almost fifty responses, we were able to post answers to questions in our story twice a week during the course of the campaign. This aspect was useful in creating interaction from the community as well as giving the students a little more comfort while graduating during such an unprecedented time. 

Website

For the second part of our digital campaign, we expanded our original plan for an event website into a large-scale portfolio presentation site. This was designed to be a hub with examples of each students’ work where reviewers could look at the work of the class of 2020 easily. We included links to each person’s individual websites and social media accounts so that professionals could easily find channels to reach out to them and make a connection.

The first part of the website is a slider that is meant to resemble the invitation that we never got to send out. On the students’ page, we included the design field filter to allow reviewers to look up specific types of designers. This was an important way to help resolve a pain point we found while looking at feedback from previous years.

Research

On this project, I started by researching event branding and social media best practices, while our other Lead Strategist, Rebecca, researched website best practices. This was incredibly useful in setting the foundation of this project and learning important factors to keep in mind while we designed. While reading about event branding I learned to consider the entire arc of the attendee’s journey from when they first hear about the event to after they leave it and the importance of maintaining brand consistency throughout.

Then, as we worked to build our creative brief I looked into feedback from previous years. This information was helpful in building out attendee personas as well as creating success metrics. One of the metrics that we had set, for example, was to have a 25% increase in attendance from professionals to follow the growth trend of previous years.