Visual Design Guidelines

If you know me, you probably know that I like to fashion myself a bit of a "hack graphic designer." I call myself a hack because I enjoy doing this kind of work, especially layout. That being said, I have only taken one formal design class and very few scholarly art and design classes. All of my knowledge of Adobe past the basics is self-taught. I went to a conference on Friday where I had a chance to meet a professional graphic designer who worked for the academic library. He was conducting a great poster session on branding. (The poster is at the end of this post, for those interested.) We talked briefly about the fact that Mr. Crawford was a professional graphic designer and the issues that we had at our institution. In brief, we had a person who worked in a marketing role, but that position was subsumed by the university and we now have to rely on a central pool of marketing professionals, instead of having one person in the library who coordinated the marketing. This has been problematic for us, and instead of relying on the marketing pool (which has a 6-week lead time), many of the people in the building have been making flyers, TV slides, and posters to advertise in-house events. For a recent game night, the planner actually had 4 of us make different posters for the game night, which caused a bit of friendly competition and resulted in some really creative posters. There are many different ways that libraries configure their marketing. If you find yourself suddenly needing to make a marketing tool like a flyer or poster, here is a instructional tool that my colleague, David Hisle made for his Instructional Design class. I think that it really sums up the basics of visual design well, and I wanted to share it with you. It teaches the basics of visual branding.  Here is a link to it.

The poster from the conference can be seen below:


Poster by Crawford & Yeager, UNCW from Azalea Coast Conference, Wilmington, NC 2016