Taproot Project For the HOPE Program

It’s a rainy sum­mer day and I have made the trip to down­town Brook­lyn to meet with Irene Camp and Jen­nifer Mitchell, Devel­op­men­tal Direc­tor and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, respec­tive­ly. They’re locat­ed in a big old ware­house of a build­ing at a busy inter­sec­tion near the Ful­ton Street Mall.

It’s late in the day and the reg­u­lar office staff has gone home, but there are still some stu­dents and staff work­ing on ter­mi­nals and end-of-the-day stuff. The admin­is­tra­tive offices are locat­ed to one side, with offices and a large wait­ing room. There, I final­ly meet them, two engag­ing, cheer­ful, and opti­mistic women who love what they do and want you to know about it.

After a brief tour of their facil­i­ties, we sit down and talk about what they are look­ing for in the design and the brochure. First they bring me up to speed on how far the project has come and their take on the pre­vi­ous design work. The ear­li­er designs they thought were too boxy, rec­tan­gu­lar images with columns of type, and the over­all look was not real­ly dis­tinc­tive. Jen­nifer then showed me an exam­ple of some­thing she liked. It was from a dif­fer­ent non-prof­it that served a sim­i­lar mis­sion. It was sim­ple, bold and mod­ern fea­tur­ing close up black and white images of clients sil­hou­et­ted against a white back­ground and areas of deep blue and red. They used a sim­ple sans serif type­face, a lay­out that allowed for lots of white space.

From there I sug­gest­ed an idea of using a full-body group shot of some of their suc­cess­ful clients in their work clothes, with sup­port­ing images of the train­ing sit­u­a­tions on the inside spread. We could show the vari­ety of skills they have as well as the types of busi­ness­es where they work. The vital­i­ty of the images would let prospec­tive employ­ers feel a per­son­al con­nec­tion with these peo­ple and real­ly sell the pro­gram.

Jen­nifer and Irene real­ly like the idea and start think­ing of who they could round up for a group shot. They have a pro­gram that trains peo­ple for the food indus­try and one of their can­di­dates was an intern at Mur­ray Cheese; they were very proud of him.

So this is the tack I will take in devel­op­ing the design. They’re still not sure, though, of how they want to dis­trib­ute it and though their favorite sam­ple was a 7-inch square I sug­gest that we start with a for­mat that will fit into a busi­ness enve­lope in case they want to do a mail­ing. If a client has doubts, I pre­fer to be a lit­tle cau­tious. Also I want to be able to save them some mon­ey.

But this project needs to get start­ed because the writ­ing and research have been done and the Tap­root group wants to do a pre­sen­ta­tion at the end of the month. Let’s have fun.