Sorry, dudes, but I’ve moved to Posterous. I just can’t handle Tumblr’s hipness anymore.

Next project was for RARA, an organization that was responsible for starting a semi-semesterly student art exhibition, as well as creating exhibition space in dining spaces on campus.

I’ve been with them from the start, and this was unfortunately to be my last project due to schoolwork and such.

The exhibition’s theme was chosen to be “pollution,” so I chose the most logical image for the flyer, me covered in corn syrup and food dye. I’ve had the concept in my head for a while, and it was great to see an opportunity present itself.

It was pretty simple. The only hard part of it was awkwardly asking my suitemate to photograph me shirtless while I poured corn syrup on myself in the shower.

I also went one step farther with the project by creating a fanpage for RARA on Facebook and migrating its media from its old group page. I felt that it would be better to announce messages as a singular entity, rather than as individuals of the organization, and of course, fanpages get to appear on newsfeeds, unlike groups. This transition resulted in an increase in reached persons by over 200%.

Social media, as we all know, is important. It is the new ‘synergy/ideation/whatever” after all. But what’s even more important is that we learn to integrate it into the marketing strategy without just having the obligatory “‘like’ us on Facebook” sticker for its own sake. So how do we do this? How do we convey useful information through Facebook to our audience that cannot be done through other mediums?

For OBC, this means using the platform as a messaging tool where members are given special opportunities, such as free movie passes and free food. We try to encourage interaction and increase our visibility on newsfeeds by requiring people to click like or comment on the relevant OBC status. But then this brings up the question, couldn’t we do this via e-mail? Why should we use Facebook to market ourselves for the sake of marketing? How are we using Facebook most effectively?

For RARA, I’m not sure what should be done. Perhaps we’ll use it as a digital catalogue for all the pieces that we display, then at the end of the year, we could ask the audience to choose their favourite by clicking like on their favourite piece. Cheesy, I know, so I’ll think of some better ideas.

  • October 07, 2010, 1:31am

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I also made banners for the relaunch of the Olin Business Council. There were a few problems we needed to address:

  • OBC’s reputation as disorganized and poorly managed 
  • OBC’s non-reputation of not doing much
  • The business school’s reputation of being far too easy

During my summer in Vancouver, I spent a lot of my time in public transit, so I had many opportunities to look at banner ads. What was great to see with them was that even with such limited space, the designers were able to clearly and effectively communicate their message with minimal elements. My favourites were the ones for the Food Network announcing its show lineup with such punchy slogans that strike a discord with your expectations.

“Flour Power”

“You have to break a few egos.”

“An amazing race. With dessert.”

So great.

That’s exactly what I wanted to do with OBC’s rebranding campaign. So I made the dimensions similar to that of a banner ad, and came up with slogans that would convey the message of professional development, confidence, and motivated leaders with the same bold tone.

It was surprisingly well-received, which I’m very happy about. People took samples, and I even saw it posted up onto a personal bulletin board. That really made my day.

Unfortunately, there was no direct method of measuring the success of the campaign, but I believe that it contributed to the 400% increase in attendance of the first meeting over the last year’s.

I’ve also created a new logo for the Olin Business Council. It’ll be the last revision I do. I promise. It works better on three points: The stamp is more scalable since the text inside the circle can retain its legibility in smaller sizes The taller font allows the entire logo to feel more neutral, which is desirable for a student government, especially a student government for a business school Avant Garde Gothic is so 2008. Helvetica variants are so current.

I’ve also created a new logo for the Olin Business Council. It’ll be the last revision I do. I promise.

It works better on three points:

  • The stamp is more scalable since the text inside the circle can retain its legibility in smaller sizes
  • The taller font allows the entire logo to feel more neutral, which is desirable for a student government, especially a student government for a business school
  • Avant Garde Gothic is so 2008. Helvetica variants are so current.

Washington University Political Review

This year, I took the position of Director of Design for the Washington University Political Review, which means that I am responsible for the visual appeal of the magazine.

But “visual appeal,” what does that even mean?

That means:

  • Redesigning the logo and the cover

Yikes!


Yes, please!

  • Creating a more consistent layout

Gee whiz!

Golly!

  • Also creating some awesome special pieces for featured articles

And now, onto the next issue! I’ll be managing an entire team for this one, which should be interesting, as I’ve never managed so many people at once before. (I wonder if I should be using Basecamp…)

But in the meantime, you can check out the newest issue here.

And here’s some miscellany

New visual identity for the Olin Business Council:

Here’s the old one:

The new one is far better, in my opinion. It’s more scalable with its stamp, and more flexible due to its simplicity.

Layouts for WUPR:

Here’s the other thing that I’ve been up to

2. Alternative Career Week

Alternative Career Week was an initiative by the Olin Business Council to provide information and valuable networks to those interested in atypical careers. Each day was dedicated to a particular industry. The first was media, for which executives from Sony and Microsoft came, in addition to the manager of Peter Jackson. The second was high technology, for which executives from Microsoft came. The third was sports management, for which the Director of Marketing for the St. Louis Rams came. The fourth was fashion, for which a designer, a buyer, and an executive headhunter came.

For the event, I wanted to go with a box theme to emphasize the business cliche of “breaking out of the box”. So for the campaign, I made 75 paper cubes to distribute for advertising purposes.

Here are the many sheets that I had to cut out:

Here is the product:

The exec board of the OBC wanted something crazy to attract everyone’s attention, so I decided to make mannequins. I ordered three inflatable mannequins, covered them in the flyers that I designed, and installed them in a high-traffic area on campus.

Here was the process:

This is the mannequin before being covered in anything.

This is one of the mannequins in the process of being covered. I used flour and water to stick the flyers on. It felt like elementary school. It was fun.

I wanted to incorporate the motif of cubes into the mannequins as well, but I knew that I wanted it to look more abstract, as the cube were rising from the torso. To achieve the effect, I decided to create cardboard cube-heads for each mannequin.

The cardboard head you see here is made of the box that the mannequins came in and duct tape. This head took half an hour to construct.

This head took an hour.

I wanted to make sure that the objects looked as if they were rising from the torsos, so I took a long time to create an extension of the cube that flows smoothly down unto the torso with duct tape. Like so:

Then I began to paper mache, which took around an hour for each mannequin. Here are the finished products:

I wasn’t able to finish the third one in time, but I still plan on finishing it. Once I do, I’ll post pictures.

So the mannequins were installed by a staircase landing, which was an attractive display area. Here they are in action:

Of course, I made the traditional flyer, which was mounted.

I also made around seven flyers for this event. One for each day (4), one listing all the executives, one generic flyer (see above), and a general itinerary for each day. It was interesting as I had to have a consistent look for each flyer, which I suppose is an exercise for corporate advertising.

The most annoying thing was that I had to recreate the logo for the WU Career Center as they didn’t have a high-res logo on their site. It took a while, but it was great practice.

So yeah.

So I’ve been busy.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

1. Struc: an exhibition on construction/deconstruction

I didn’t have a chance to be as involved with this exhibition as I didn’t have as much time. As a result, I put a lot less time and effort into this one, but I think it still turned out well pretty well.

To promote the exhibition, we chopped up 100 blocks of 4x4x4 wooden cubes. The idea was to ask people to write/draw the event that has shaped them to be who they are today. A lot of the cubes weren’t filled up by the time of the exhibition, so we asked people at the exhibition to fill them out. And so they did:

It was pretty swell.

(Pictured: Attendees of Profile Me, an exhibition on racial profiling) Great success! I estimate the crowd to have been around 60 people, which is three times greater than that of the previous exhibition. Why this picture is significant is because it is the culmination of weeks of work. I first came up with an idea to have a photobooth on campus so we (by which I mean Chris) could take portraits of people from around the campus and use the pictures to create a giant photo collage. My reasoning for this plan was that the photobooth in and of itself attracts attention, especially when set in a high traffic area such as a dining hall, which is great marketing. And! Having the pictures of people as a part of an art exhibition gives incentives for people to come to see themselves as a part of art. So we executed this plan. One weekend for the photobooth. God knows how long for Chris to touch up all the photos and set the Profile Me logo onto each picture, then arrange the photos into a collage. Then three hours of me e-mailing all of these pictures out to each individual (all 152 of them), asking them to set the pictures as their Facebook profile pictures, and to link to the event page. And bam, you’ve got this. This was the most exhausting and comprehensive marketing campaign that I’ve ever done. It used guerrilla tactics, it was consumer-involved, and it used social networking. To say the least, I’m proud of us as a duo for pulling this off.

(Pictured: Attendees of Profile Me, an exhibition on racial profiling)

Great success!

I estimate the crowd to have been around 60 people, which is three times greater than that of the previous exhibition.

Why this picture is significant is because it is the culmination of weeks of work. I first came up with an idea to have a photobooth on campus so we (by which I mean Chris) could take portraits of people from around the campus and use the pictures to create a giant photo collage. My reasoning for this plan was that the photobooth in and of itself attracts attention, especially when set in a high traffic area such as a dining hall, which is great marketing. And! Having the pictures of people as a part of an art exhibition gives incentives for people to come to see themselves as a part of art.

So we executed this plan. One weekend for the photobooth. God knows how long for Chris to touch up all the photos and set the Profile Me logo onto each picture, then arrange the photos into a collage. Then three hours of me e-mailing all of these pictures out to each individual (all 152 of them), asking them to set the pictures as their Facebook profile pictures, and to link to the event page.

And bam, you’ve got this.

This was the most exhausting and comprehensive marketing campaign that I’ve ever done. It used guerrilla tactics, it was consumer-involved, and it used social networking.

To say the least, I’m proud of us as a duo for pulling this off.