By Austin Leonard
Remember receiving a welcome packet after getting accepted to King University? Recently, students in the Multipage Design course, taught within the Digital Media Art & Design (DMAD) program at King University, got the opportunity to work with the Advancement Office to design digital welcome packets for newly accepted students. This project is an important opportunity to work with an actual client and have their designs used, especially in school.
The project was being conducted as real client work, and students wrote up creative briefs featuring any research and details that was being gathered through the client interview prior to beginning the design process. They also created several sketches for layout and thematic ideas for each packet. Each student designed two packets, featuring about pages for King University and the DMAD program as well as five student spotlights, with the primary goal of each booklet to be show the personality of each designer. The goal was to create a packet that was interesting, easy to read, and showed the values of the school. The final product had to be professional and well-produced, considering the constraints of branding, space, and the deadline. Each student also got the chance to include a short bio and picture of themselves as the designer.
The Advancement Office will be choosing a packet that is going to be sent to accepted students in digital format. It is also possible they will also be selecting a cover from one of the packets that is going to be featured in the King Magazine!
In my own experience while working on this project, I found that it was really interesting, not to mention a valuable opportunity, to get a taste of what a project like this could be like in the real world, which I’m sure many of the other students involved would agree with. While preparing to design my packets I wrote down anything our client mentioned that they liked and preferred as well as any specific things I needed to keep in mind, anything from branding colors and fonts to adjectives and values that they wanted to be communicated through the design. Then I looked for inspiration and tried to brainstorm themes that could be both interesting and appealing to look at.
For example, it was suggested by our client to go for a magazine-style look, large images and small paragraph within columns of text. Since that was something that would impact the layout, I focused on figuring out how to achieve that look with the information I had. Sometimes it’s also important to think about the small details, I chose to round all the edges on every image in my packet to try to make it appear softer, and more welcoming, which was something we were asked to try to achieve. Design is all about functionality and appeal, and they go hand in hand.
