Drexel's fundraising officers requested a piece they could take to donor visits to demonstrate the impact of the Campaign for Drexel, a multi-year fundraising campaign.
I took the opportunity to shift how we worked; instead of the team’s typical copy-first and copy-heavy approach, I worked with the copywriter to involve the visuals and engineering from the start, enhancing the quality of the work. The result was an impactful piece, which is easy to consume, yet it packs all the information we wanted to convey. This opened the door to more collaborations and asserted the design team’s involvement in the early stages of planning projects. I collaborated with the content developer to ideate the piece and I designed it.
Role: Creative director, designer
Client: Drexel University Institutional Advancement
Employer: Drexel University Institutional Advancement
Engagement: Creative direction, design, print production
Impact:
The piece was well received and required reprints
The project led the path to more collaborative work; future collaborations involved visual and copy working together rather than sequentially
The Campaign focused on impact, particularly on our university population; the piece focuses on the donor and the impact of their giving.
As the viewer unfolds the piece the adjacent panels interact with each other’s photos, content, and arrows; the goal was to have a print piece that feels interactive
Process
Working with the copywriter, we established the piece's goals—to showcase all the areas of impact for the Campaign. We wanted a piece that was concise and easy to consume.
We agreed to highlight our new photography and write minimal copy. We wanted a piece that would be interesting and stand out from the crowd, but at the same time, we wanted something that would be easy to navigate. Our gift officers carried a lot of documents and we didn't want this to get lost, nor did we want this to add too much volume.
Initial sketches showcasing the proposed engineering
I began sketching a few ideas for the engineering and ran them by the copywriter. We quickly landed on a barrel-folded piece, where panels interact with each other as they open, both by connecting the arrows and by pairing copy from one panel with the image of the next panel. We brainstormed copy ideas and how to pair the different projects represented with the Campaign's principles. We iterated a couple of times, adjusting the visuals and the copy, before presenting to our partners for approval.
