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In fall of 2019, I helped the University of Washington Honors department redesign their print collateral for marketing study abroad programs. The initial problem was that the current print collateral was verbose and failed to prioritize information that matters to students.
To address this issue, I collected information from students via surveys to better understand the information they wanted to know about study abroad programs. Then, I redesigned new print collateral to reflect those findings.
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Before starting the redesign, I looked at print collateral from last year to scope out strong points as well as opportunities for improvement. Going into the process, my supervisor informed me that she wanted to drive more traffic to the honors departmental website while reducing the amount of text on both the posters and postcards. When doing critique, I looked to better understand how these materials did or did not accomplish this goal.
The above designs are visually pleasant but in general they lack the necessary visual cues to guide the viewer's eye. First, the text on the poster could benefit from slight adjustments. It is aligned left-ragged, which is counter to how we naturally read in English. Hierarchy of the text is also mostly communicated through size rather than by style and weight, which makes all the non-bolded text appear equally important. On the postcard back, the text is nicely sectioned into boxes, but their arrangement makes it hard to know which order to read them in. The eye naturally wants to read the top left box first and then the program description below, but the lack of alignment between the top right box and the two below causes confusion.
Before I started drafting templates, I wanted to better understand what information was most and least important to students. This in theory would allow me to know what could be eliminated from future print collateral. Because I only had a few days, I created a survey, and it received 13 respondents who were University of Washington undergraduate students. Prior to designing the survey, I took the information from the 2019 poster design and organized it into the following categories:
Survey results helped me understand what text could be eliminated from future print collateral designs while still including information that mattered to students. The research deliverable that came out of this was a new hierarchy of information that more accurately reflected what students wanted to know about study abroad programs:
Moving forward, I was eager to use the insights from research inform my designs. Aside from the study abroad programs, the honors department was also interested in launching a print marketing campaign for their Bonderman Fellowship, which awards students with funds to travel the world and broaden their horizons. I did not conduct research for it because it was lower priority, and I had less of a foundation to build on. To explore ideas, I started by sketching them out as shown below.
In the initial stages, I wanted to push the limits by using organic forms and minimal text. In subsequent explorations however, my supervisor and I decided it was best to make a template that would allow the poster image to be front and center. As you can see, other explorations used text in the top and bottom while making the image the center of attention. As many respondents in the survey had marked “experiencing another culture” as a reason to study abroad, it was important to allow ample space for the image that would tell the story of each program.
After finalizing templates for the study abroad programs, I moved on to making a template for the Bonderman Fellowship materials. Here, I based my explorations for the postcard front and back off of the subsequent templates for the study abroad programs.
With some different directions having been explored, it was time to pick a winner. The resulting poster and postcard templates below were inspired by the sporty and elegant aesthetic of the University of Washington branding. Because program location was considered to be the most important factor according to students, it was put in bold to give visual hierarchy. Other information includes the program dates and the program title, which also gives a sense of the departments involved. For the postcard, the copy on the front, “Study in (location)!,” was a call to action that reinforced the fact that study abroad programs are academic in nature. Both templates include the University of Washington “W” and the honors url to drive traffic to the departmental website.
For the Bonderman fellowship materials, I based my explorations for the postcard front and back off of the templates for the study abroad programs. The final templates above for the Bonderman fellowship have a clear visual relationship with the study abroad templates. Both use curves to elegantly frame the image and create an inviting feel that encourages students to stop and potentially visit the website to learn more about the fellowship.
Once I had properly sourced images and verified them with my supervisor, I set to customizing the template for each study abroad program. After sending drafts to each program coordinator, I made slight edits in response to their requests, sometimes adding a departmental logo or additional contact information. Below are the final drafts that were sent to print for each study abroad program.
The honors department received record numbers of applicants to their study abroad programs as well as to the Bonderman fellowship. All the program leaders I worked with were also delighted to see the new designs. In summary, the undertaking was a success.
This project was a wonderful opportunity for me to get experience designing for clients and using human-centered principles to improve the outcome. Below are reflections and improvements I would make to the overall process if I had more time.
