Promotional Materials, proof sheet

To read our previous posts about working with Creative Services to develop promotional materials, click here and here, or just keep scrolling down.

I received an email from Noel Cunningham of Creative Services at the end of Week 9 with a proof of our poster and a proof sheet that we need to sign and return. The sheet asks if we're satisfied, if changes need to be made, and if we need to view a second proof if changes are necessary.

We have posters: 200 @ 11x17 and 2 @24x36. We also have 400 postcards. Check your mailboxes!

Creative Services did an excellent job!

Creating a Poster with Columbia's Creative Services

I met with Edward Thomas at Creative Services on May 12 (Week 7) to discuss our promotional materials for the big-deal Symposium happening on Wednesday, May 12, 4-6 pm at Hokin Auditorium (623 S. Wabash, 1st floor). (Please attend and inform your students of this event!)

I suggest taking a look at their Workflow guidelines for how and where to start.

We didn't look at this site before "designing" our poster and walking into the Creative Services office (without an appointment) to drop off a disk of our materials. Like you probably saw (or skipped over, per my suggestion) in an earlier post, Kristen and I designed our poster ourselves, knowing and hoping that the design expertise of those at Creative Services would make it into something beautiful, eye-catching, "Columbia," and informative (even if that meant starting from scratch, which we were okay with).

Rather than design (no matter how great, no matter how poor), Creative Services prefers you bring them ideas and inspiration. Kristen found a photograph of decorative plates with birds on them. Her students liked those birds. Those are the birds I drew into our poster. Rather than draw them into a poster, Creative Services would prefer you bring them that particular photo and describe to them what you like about it.

There's a form you need to fill out. Make an appointment with Edward Thomas. Send him the form and a Word document (not a PDF) with the verbiage for your promotional materials. (Forms and contacts are available on the Workflow website). Bring inspiration and ideas to your meeting.

Info for form: Critical Encounters Fellow Eric Scholl suggested we print 200 posters. We said we needed the posters by April 21 (Wednesday of Week 12) for our May 12 event (Week 15).

Creative Services is in the process of creating our posters, looking for images that match the qualities we liked about the birds -- something drawn or painted, which we liked for its handmade quality, and something (like birds) that can represent the religious and the natural.

I'll let you know how the process continues.

Creating a poster for the symposium

Before, after, or instead of reading this posting, read our guidelines for working with Creative Services to develop promotional materials at this posting: "Creating a Poster with Columbia's Creative Services."

During Week 6 we've created a poster to bring to Creative Services to promote our symposium on Wednesday, May 12, 4-6 pm in the Hokin Auditorium, 623 S. Wabash, first floor. (Please join us! Tell your students about this event!)

Kristen and I (Kate) asked our students about design ideas and preferences. Kristen had a more extended conversation with her students which she might share on the blog or within this post. On Monday I passed out a photocopy of an idea that Maureen and I had discussed the previous week. I wanted them to have something they could take apart and reconstruct.

I was inspired by this fantastic Critical Encounters poster:

Isn't it fantastic? I liked the idea of the squares because I feel like we have so much information to get across with this poster -- that it's sponsored by both Critical Encounters & First Year Writing, that it's Writing & Rhetoric II students presenting, time & location, etc.

Maureen and I visualized photos of our students, some boxes with obscured text to communicate that we're a writing class, a photograph of a microphone, and all of the information I included above -- the departments, the class, time, location.

Here's what our sketch looked like:

This is what Kristen and I gave to our students to reconstruct.

Kristen's students wanted the poster to show ears, people listening to express that the students presenting will be speaking to an audience. One of her students drew a close-up of a profile speaking to other students, seated, listening.

I told my students that I had searched for images that conjoin fact and faith or even science and religion (though we try to encourage/remind them that science and religion are not the limitations or only definitions of fact and faith) but that everything I found was pretty horrible. One of my students drew Jesus in a lab coat. Apparantly there was some mix up in the English Department because I didn't find her drawing in my mailbox before Kristen and I needed to nail down a design for Creative Services.

Kristen and I met up and discussed our students' responses. Kristen's students had also mentioned an interest in birds and trees -- both images of science and religion. So we went with that idea. Here's our sketch of the ad:

We're taking it to Creative Services tomorrow. We'll let you know how that goes.