What happened at Price of Life?

Wondering what happened at Price of Life in October? Here's a brief snapshot. Thank you for your prayers and support in this life-changing event.

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Price of Life - it's coming up soon!

The Price of Life campaign is happening next week! After months of working on this, I am excited to see things coming together. If only I could be there in Michigan to be a part of it in person! Here is some of the work I've done for the campaign.

Please pray for God to be at work this next week. I am hopeful and excited to see him change lives and change culture. I'm grateful for the opportunity to contribute to helping fight human trafficking and sharing the hope of Jesus.

a collection of some of the print pieces I've designed for Price of Life

This is the first time I've had design work featured on a bus! Exciting.

My Michigan colleagues sent me this picture of one of the banners I designed.

It is surreal to see my work on my alma mater's campus! Wish I could see it in person.

I printed a couple of banners for the kick-off event's photo booth where students will take pictures of themselves to post on Facebook to promote Price of Life. I thought I'd get a selfie before mailing it off.

Upcoming Notecards

One of the smaller and sometimes more fun things we get to do is design new InterVarsity-branded notecards that our staff can use. Most of the time these are Thank You cards used to send to ministry partners. But we also produce Christmas cards and Invitation cards. Here are a couple I've designed recently that will be printed soon!

Creating a Campaign

For the past several months I've been working on a number of pieces related to an upcoming event happening at my own alma mater, The Price of Life campaign.

In October, InterVarsity chapters at the University of Michigan will be partnering with many local and state-wide organizations to raise awareness and fight against human trafficking (modern day slavery).

fact sheet explaining more about human trafficking including statistics

Human trafficking is a global issue affecting millions of people. But it also hits close to home. There are said to be up to 300,000 children or more currently enslaved in the United States.

postcard sent to all residents of a UofM dorm inviting them
to a kit build (to assist those most vulnerable to trafficking)

As believers in a God who created all humans to bear his image, human slavery is unquestionably the worst offense to what we hold sacred.

front page of the Price of Life website

I'm excited to lend my design skills to contribute to this important effort. I wanted to show you some of my work as well as ask for your prayers as the students and staff at UofM enter into this campaign.

prayer card for InterVarsity students to encourage them to be praying over the summer

The aim is to raise awareness to 30,000 people in the state of Michigan and engage 5,000 people in Ann Arbor in significant conversations about human trafficking and how the Gospel relates to this issue. 

PowerPoint background for when InterVarsity staff make presentations
to other organizations inviting them to partner in the campaign

Please pray that God would go before us in giving us success to fight against this evil. And pray that many people would clearly hear the Gospel at these events, coming to understand Jesus as the only true solution to human trafficking.

poster to be used around campus in the weeks leading up to the campaign

And pray for me as I provide visual resources for this campaign, that my work would effectively communicate and promote the event.

Stay tuned for more!

The Young People Get It!

Photo Credit: Melissa Montecuollo

As I have done for the past few years, I presented at our annual Orientation for New Staff conference (ONS) to talk about branding and design. This year, however, we introduced a new interactive component to the talk, giving new staff some time to create their own fake prayer letter using a variety of options (photos, captions, headlines, etc.).

Staff were given 3-4 options for each of these elements of a prayer letter,
then asked to choose 7-10 pieces and create their own pretend letter.

Photo Credit: Anna Maffety

After giving them a few minutes to work in groups, I led a time of debrief, giving an overview of some main principles of design and communication.

These were the four options for the header. Which one do you think works best?

What I learned from leading this new activity is that these young staff get it! As I debriefed with them, I found them to be very astute and intuitive about design, catching on to ideas of scan message, using the right colors and fonts, communicating visually through images and layout, and other important principles.

This is the moment in my presentation where I tell staff to have someone
take a picture of them while they're speaking. It always gets a good laugh.
Photo Credit: Anna Maffety

Each year as I teach this component at ONS, I'm finding that the new staff get it so much more quickly than a lot of older staff I work with. It makes sense, as these new staff are much more familiar with current culture trends like the use of visuals, social media, and shorter bits of communication rather than longer ones. It doesn't take much for me to sell "branding" to them because they totally get the value of good branding. It's encouraging to see things move this way, and I'm hopeful that this means my quest to brand InterVarsity well is in good hands with these "young'uns"!

Note: If you are interested in using this training tool with your staff, area, region, or students, please contact me!

Making a Case

As I showed you last month, a recent project I worked on was a new brochure that helps new staff present a case for InterVarsity's ministry on campus to new/potential donors. I showed you my first pencil sketch draft last month, and here's the final product!

The challenge in a brochure is that many people merely skim it rather than read all of the content. My job as a designer is to design it so that people can skim and get all the critical information, but also feel invited into reading more. I did this by using plenty of pictures, breaking text up into small paragraphs that begin with bolder, bigger fonts, creating variety of layouts to keep people interested, and visualizing some of the content using graphic elements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infographic: A year in review!

It's been a big year! Pat and I got married, traveled over 15,000 miles, and contributed to many events and programs that led thousands of students to faith in Jesus. We're grateful for your partnership in prayer and financial support this year, and for your friendship and support as we joined our lives together in marriage.

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We're looking to reach our budget by the end of June by raising another $5,000. Would you prayerfully consider giving a one-time year-end gift, or begin a monthly gift as we start a new fiscal year?

 

Sometimes, pencil and paper works best

A current project I'm working on is an updated brochure for new staff to give to potential ministry partners who want to learn more about InterVarsity. The first part of my design process for a project like this is to think through how the text will be separated onto each spread, based on the content of the text. Once I've made a plan for that, I start sketching each spread and making an estimate of where the text will go and how it will work together with images and other elements. These sketches will be my guide as I work in the computer to actually lay this all out with the actual text and real images. Sometimes working with paper and pencil is a lot faster when you're in the initial stages of design!

Stay tuned for the final product by June or so.

An Animated Infographic

Global Urban Trek Promotional from InterVarsity twentyonehundred on Vimeo.

Last fall I shared with you an infographic I created to promote InterVarsity's Global Urban Trek program. This spring it was turned into an animated video, with the talents of one of our team's talented interns who specializes in animation. Check out the video and see if you can recognize the elements from my original infographic!

My (Ongoing) Ethnic Journey

Being a biracial couple, ethnicity is something my husband Pat and I talk about on a regular basis. We often discuss the tension we feel in InterVarsity. Although we work at the national headquarters, we don't see InterVarsity's value for multiethnicity demonstrated in very many practical ways at the office. For example, most of the leadership in the office consists of white older males, which has a large influence on how meetings are run, how people are supervised, and how decisions are made. Many ethnic minority staff feel voiceless and don't have a way to express certain painful experiences related to being an ethnic minority.

However, in recent weeks and months, many of our coworkers have started discussing these issues together. And Pat, being on the planning committee for our weekly chapel, initiated a three-week series on the topic of multiethnicity.With some of our coworkers, many of whom are also ethnic minorities like me, we worked on a series that would help the office be more aware of the dynamics that go on (such as white privilege), as well as encourage our coworkers to engage in this issue and pursue something better together.

For the second week of the series, we planned a panel discussion, and I was one of three ethnic minority staff who spoke about our experience at the office. We felt very vulnerable sharing some painful and hard things, but I was encouraged by the response from others who said thank you and who followed up with questions and conversation.

Since Pat and I don't often work together, we were energized to collaborate on this project. We hope it will bear fruit in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

You can listen to the panel here
(about 45 minutes long). 

The other two coworkers on the panel are David Hui and Haley Compean, facilitated by Lisa Rieck.

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you do get a chance to listen to this!

Please continue to pray for InterVarsity. Although we have come a long way in making our organization more welcoming and inclusive to all ethnicities, we still have a lot to learn. May God give us grace as well as conviction to see His kingdom come in its fullness.

Branding Dilemmas

I'm so sorry it's been a LONG time (four months!) since I have blogged. I got out of the rhythm when I was planning my wedding, and just have not stayed on top of everything since getting married!

I'm working on a number of various things but one larger, more nebulous project that's on my plate has been to work towards building a strong brand for InterVarsity. Branding involves a lot of things that go beyond just a good logo, but as a designer, I am focusing on the visual part of our brand, which does involve our logo and other visual markers of who we are.

To show the scope of what we are dealing with, I did a little research on social media to assess where InterVarsity was at with our brand. I grabbed the logos or images being used by all of our InterVarsity chapters all over the country. Then I compared that with the images being used by chapters of two other large campus ministries - Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and the Navigators.

Here's what I found. (click on images to view bigger)

Cru:

Navigators:

InterVarsity:

As you can see, InterVarsity has the least consistency across our various chapters' presence on social media. Contrasting it with Cru, which has extremely consistent branding, and Navs, which is less consistent but at least has a recognizable shape/logo that exists across its chapters, I realize that our task is a large one. Something that's particularly challenging for us is that InterVarsity's logo is long and thin:

It is not conducive to the square shape that social media is moving towards. In fact, our current solution for the national InterVarsity Facebook and Twitter accounts is probably not super ideal:

So, I've got a big task ahead! Please pray that God would provide wisdom and insight into how to solve these issues, and that those who hold influence and power in our ministry would be on board with finding good solutions, allowing me to help increase our brand recognition, and hopefully as a result, our impact on campus.