Design for America is a design community that uses human-centered design dedicated to social impact in the San Diego community. As a visual designer for UC San Diego's Chapter, I worked on two 10-week-long projects, highlighted below.
During my first quarter as a Visual Designer for UC San Diego's Design For America chapter, I worked with a team of 5 to redesign our company website. We began by conducting user research, creating wireframes, gaining feedback, creating low-mid-fidelity prototypes, and ending the project with a high-fidelity Figma prototype. My role was to conduct two user interviews over Zoom and design the past projects page, in addition to assisting with the overall visual design of the website.
How might we create an engaging and informative marketing campaign that reaches ArtReach’s target audience and beyond?
ArtReach is a San Diego nonprofit striving to increase access to visual arts education for students. Our Design For America team was tasked with delivering a marketing campaign over the course of 10 weeks for their upcoming guitar auction, utilizing social media and human-centered design.
THE PROCESS
My process began by creating mood boards of styles, Typography, and color palettes for reference, utilizing social media and Pinterest. Artreach requested to use bright and bold color choices but to keep a clean and consistent design style. Next, our team created a style guide that explored a bright but readable color palette. After group meetings to determine the strongest solution, we presented our ideas to ArtReach for feedback.
Before beginning my designs, our team created google form surveys asking the San Diego community about their social media platform preferences. Our sample was comprised of students, past attendees of the fundraiser, and artists in San Diego. We identified Instagram as the preferred platform for outreach and gained insights into what aesthetics users gravitate towards.
Next, we asked past attendees of the fundraiser about their previous engagement with the ArtReach auction. I conducted interviews over zoom with previous artists and contributors, inquiring about how they heard about the program. In addition, we conducted a Google survey which identified text as the top way for users to engage on social media.
We then utilized the findings of our research to create user personas for our target audience. Gathering data about age, location, interests, and social media engagement allowed us an understanding of the target attendees and audience for our campaign.
After identifying our target audience and design style, I created an initial set of social media graphics including an event banner, Instagram story graphics, and event information posts. I explored a grid-style layout, bright colors, and playful typography.
Based on feedback from the Design For America team and ArtReach, I presented my final assets for our marketing campaign to the ArtReach and Design For America teams. My grid style design was chosen as Instagram content, and our collaborative team deliverables were a Facebook post and banner, a Twitter image, and Instagram story graphics.
NEXT STEPS AND REFLECTION
We coordinated with ArtReach to transfer the deliverables to be reproduced for the art auction and shared our research findings. We learned the importance of reaching old and new targeted audiences and the “why?” behind creating marketing campaigns.
Team Credit: Jasmine Robinson, Autumn Bui, Avery Hom, Camille Yabut, Kayla Luong
