JBU Honors Program T-Shirt Design
I designed two T-shirt designs for a local farmer's market, created for the purpose of screenprinting with no more than three colors.
Promotional Digital
Ad Design
CLIENT: JOHN BROWN UNIVERSITY GRAD & ONLINE DEPARTMENTS
WORK DONE: DIGITAL AD DESIGN
One of my major projects while working on one-off freelance jobs for a variety of JBU departments was to design a large set of digital ads for Google, Next Gen advertising, and Strategic Partners Geo-Fencing. My supervisor provided me with all the copy and design constraints I needed; however, most of the assets such as photography I had to find myself. This project happened to fall on my birthday weekend which was a massive stressor for me, since it added up to about 130 digital ads from scratch over the course of about four days, on top of my usual load of full time-college work. It was a tough weekend but I learned the value of hard work, speed, good feedback, and collaboration.
Despite it being my 22nd birthday, there was a bigger challenge I dealt with while tackling this project. My supervisor requested that I base most of these designs off of the previous year's ads done by another designer. She provided me with the exported JPEGs to reference, but did not have the working files on hand. I went digging for the Illustrator files and even contacted the original designer to locate them, but unfortunately, I could not access them because of the way she had set them up.
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This set me back a lot. Most of the photography from the original ads was going to be reused, so I not only had to recreate the dimensions from scratch in Illustrator, but I also had to locate the original photos, many of which I could not find. Most of them would have to be entirely replaced.
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Eighteen of the ad sets I needed to create required four different sizes each, and eight of the ad sets required seven sizes each, which added up to a lot of hours if I factored in that each of these sets would have to be made from scratch, with brand new or updated photography. I was very stressed, especially since my deadline was tight, but I set my limits with my supervisor on what I could do, which was no more than the twenty-six total ad sets.
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Overcoming a Challenge
ORIGINAL AD
File Setup
I put a lot of effort into my file setup when it came to this project specifically, since I knew that my file setup would impact the speed of my workflow drastically. My supervisor provided me with two Word documents outlining all the changes and updates that were needed as well as the necessary specs for the final files. I spent a good hour or so poring over these documents so I knew I wouldn't be going in blind or missing any details.
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I've featured screenshots of two of my Illustrator files here, one of which shows the ad sets with the four sizes, and the other of which has the ad sets with the seven sizes. The dimensions specifically were 300x250, 728x90, 320x50, 160x600; and 300x250, 728x90, 320x50, 160x600, 1200x628, 1080x1080, and 1080x1920. I named each artboard with its dimensions for exporting purposes.
Most of the ads would maintain the same placement of branding elements, CTAs, strips of color, and gradients, so I built a layer at the top of my document that held all this information. This allowed me to create several ads in one document, since I could switch out the photography and other copy on different layers below the first one. I named my layers thoroughly and left notes in red in the grey space of my document so that the organization of the file was clear.
By doing this, I was able to only have about four working files for over 130 ads, which still retained full editability and saved both me and future designers a lot of time.
Imagery
For all of the imagery that had to be updated or replaced or relocated, the burden fell on me to put it all together. Some of the images I was able to pull from other working files, but a lot of it had been unlinked (hence why I embedded for these files despite the massive file sizes) or was non-existent on our server. I chose most of this photography with my own judgment from stock image resources or other photography stored on our server, taking into account my supervisor's suggestions and desires, and once she had approved it, it was a go!
ORIGINAL AD
ORIGINAL AD
The former ads for the online ad set and the leadership ad set are featured above and below, at the only size that my supervisor could locate. Based on this, I found either a similar image of my own choosing or I found the original image to use for a variety of ad sizes, which could now be edited at will from my new working files.
ORIGINAL AD
Billboards
Most of these digital ads easily translated into billboards, and five of them were chosen to run for about a six-month cycle in the local area, specifically advertising five of JBU's most popular programs: general college, general graduate degree, general online, master's in counseling, and master's in business administration. These billboards spanned roughly 30 feet across, and it was wonderful to see a design originally made digitally translate so well to a billboard.