Create & Innovate
I worked as graphic design intern for two years in the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. During that time, I worked on the Marketing team for the CIE's main office, the HotHouse. I was mainly in charge of promoting various forums and competitions through the HotHouse that showcased and supported innovation and entrepreneurship on Cal Poly's campus and the community of SLO at large. All collateral was created under Cal Poly Marketing guidelines of colors and fonts.
YEAR
2018-2020
DELIVERABLES
Posters
Sandwich Boards
Digital Banners
Forum Agendas
Stickers
Student outreach.
For the main part, our outreach was student based on Cal Poly’s campus. We not only tried to raise student attendance at CIE forums, but also advertise our center’s competitions and programs like this 13-week Accelerator Program. In this program, student teams with startup ideas are chosen to receive $10,000 and a summer of mentorship ending in Demo Day, and the beginning of their companies.
Demo Day campaigns.
Demo Day is an annual showcase the CIE puts on for the SLO community at the end of summer. At the event, the Accelerator startups are able to present and demonstrate their businesses ideas they developed over the entirety of the summer Accelerator. At this event, the companies not only try to gain word-of-mouth, but funding from investors in the community.
Process over perfection.
It all begins with an idea. My process begins by gathering imagery, trying to collect reference photos to influence my designs. Then I sketch the directions I’ve chosen until I find a rough sketch that is visually compelling. From there, I mockup digital roughs of my favorite sketches to be chosen upon by my teammates. This poster series targeted community members and my client requested it evoke movie posters style. I decided to also create a personalized poster for each startup participating in Demo Day.
Multi-faceted campaign.
The annual Elevator Pitch Competition has a two-step publicity campaign every year. First to target the students for competitors and then secondly to target both students and the SLO community as a whole for the main event. The first poster utilized student-centered photography as well as hand lettering to create a friendly impression of the competition. The second was designed to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the competition as well as showcase the past winners logos in the sunglasses.
Beyond print.
My campaigns moved past just printed posters however, and went further to include things like sandwich boards, web banners, instagram stories, and agendas for every event. Design had to be unified across all of these platforms.
