SFU CVS Outreach Card
ROLES | Graphic design, content creator
TIMELINE | 6 months
Overview
One of the major projects that I worked on during my co-op at SFU Career and Volunteer Services was creating promotional materials for the career development tools that CVS recently offered to students such as workshops and interactive games (Who You Are Matters, Challenge Cards, Online Storyteller), which were used by the career advisors. The purpose of these cards was to fulfill the gap between the services that CVS offered and publicize them. After deleting the “classroom to career” workshop that they used to offer, they did not have any information about the workshops that they offered on any of the marketing materials such as cards or even their website.
Process
The first iteration that I created was around introducing each tool individually. I started by researching about each individual tool in order to fully understand them. After that, using Adobe illustrator, I created a poster and a brochure for each of these tools to fully explain these tools to students. Here are samples that I initially created:
brochure-front
brochure-back
Creating the first mock-ups made us realize that we don’t want to focus on the individual tools, but rather the experience and the service that we provided for them. We wanted to promote them as something that everyone could benefit from and not just students. So I started designing new cards from scratch with having these questions in mind:
How could we use more contemporary language in our promotional material?
How could we make them feel more exciting, inspiring?
How can we make people feel that they matter?
After creating a few more iterations and getting some more feedback from the youth staff and marketing team. During the last meeting, one of our teammates read something incorrectly, which lead to the birth of this idea. So, I had the title as “cue the future” but my colleague read it as “we the future” because the font that I chose was very unique. We further needed some innovative, hooky, and interesting phrases that could capture our services and we came up with “let’s get real, find your why, tell your story, get career ready”.
Mock-up
front
back
Final Designs
front
back
front
back
front
back
Results & Takeaways
These cards were spread throughout all of SFU campuses as well as in all of our career advisors offices. They are also going to be used for tabling events, outreach projects, and fairs that CVS hosts throughout the year. I’m proud to say that I got a lot of good feedback from our staff as well as other designers on campus from other departments. Some of my takeaways from this project are working around the ever changing life cycle of a project, the iterative process of design, and the constant switching of directions in the creative journey.
