All posts by Claire

Meeting the Hope Program

By On July 22, 2012 In Brochures, Non-Profit, Uncategorized With No Comments Permanent Link to Meeting the Hope ProgramPermalink

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.

The start of a project.

By On July 14, 2012 In Brochures, Non-Profit With No Comments Permanent Link to The start of a project.Permalink

I’d begun look­ing through the ser­vice grants on Taproot’s web­site and it seems most of them are staffed now. But then I get an email from EJ Minor who has been head­ing up a grant for a non-prof­it called the HOPE Pro­gram. Locat­ed in Brook­lyn, its pur­pose is to help New York­ers liv­ing in pover­ty to devel­op self-suf­fi­cien­cy, through job train­ing and employ­ment and coun­sel­ing ser­vices and has a very high suc­cess rate. The Tap­root team that EJ is head­ing is work­ing on a mar­ket­ing brochure for last six weeks. The brochure should help HOPE out-reach to new employ­ers and devel­op intern­ships and oppor­tu­ni­ties the peo­ple they train. Their cur­rent design­er dropped out due to ill­ness and would I be inter­est­ed in join­ing their team as the design­er. “Sounds sim­ple enough”, I say. “Tell me more.”

There’s a full crew involved. EJ, the project man­ag­er, along with a copy­writer, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and mar­ket­ing guru and has recent­ly com­plet­ed most of the ground­work. They learned as much as they could about HOPE’s mis­sion, train­ing meth­ods and effec­tive­ness. They inter­viewed clients and employ­ers to gath­er state­ments that could be used in the brochure to show the impact HOPE has made through its ser­vices. At this point they are writ­ing the copy and want to get the brochure designed and into pro­duc­tion by the end of August.

I have some con­cerns though; what is their bud­get, how it be dis­trib­uted, does it need to be mailed. I’m going to have to meet with the prin­ci­pals and to get a bet­ter idea of what they’re look­ing for. EJ and I dis­cuss their bud­get, which might be and some­thing around $2 per piece, but that it’s not a con­cern right now. He just wants some­thing that’s real­ly “cre­ative” and that I should real­ly let loose with any ideas I come up with.

He emailed me some of their ear­ly sketch­es done by the pre­vi­ous design­er and images of past HOPE Pro­gram brochures. They def­i­nite­ly need an update and it’s time for some leg­work. I need to meet the client.

cover and spread of older brochure.

And ear­li­er HOPE brochure from the 90’s. It has some nice images and the die-cut is a nice touch, but it only shows one aspect of what they do. The new brochure needs to address a broad­er range of ser­vices and work set­tings.

A volunteer’s experience.

By On June 30, 2012 In Brochures, Non-Profit With No Comments Permanent Link to A volunteer’s experience.Permalink

I signed up with Tap­root to make new con­tacts that would be out of my reg­u­lar pro­fes­sion­al sphere, to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing new, and, per­haps, do a lit­tle good for this world. Being between projects can make one rest­less, and even a lit­tle bug­gy.

Tap­root, if you don’t know, is an orga­ni­za­tion that match­es up pro­fes­sion­als from the cor­po­rate world with non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions that could use their exper­tise. Appli­cants can be from either side of the equa­tion; non-prof­its can use Tap­root to find qual­i­fied pro­fes­sion­als to work on spe­cif­ic projects that the non-prof­its need done, but don’t have the exper­tise to com­plete. On the oth­er hand, the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als go through a screen­ing process that assess­es their skills and abil­i­ties and match­es them to projects that the non-prof­its need done. These are called ser­vice grants.

These grants can serve any num­ber of goals, such as devel­op­ing a web­site, cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, busi­ness analy­sis, board recruit­ment, fundrais­ing projects, and so on. Doing all the things that non-prof­its need done by pro­fes­sion­als, but don’t have the bud­get or exper­tise to do them­selves. This is where the vol­un­teers come in—various smart, hard-work­ing pro­fes­sion­als with skills, exper­tise and the desire to help out. This is where I come in.

www.taprootfoundation.org

When right and left collide.

By On April 10, 2012 In Creative Thinking With No Comments Permanent Link to When right and left collide.Permalink

So for my first blog post I am won­der­ing about the left and right sides of the brain and the dif­fer­ence between the ratio­nal lin­ear way of orga­niz­ing and under­stand­ing the world and the intu­itive, non ratio­nal, gestalt of the right side. A lot of oth­er peo­ple have been think­ing about this too, when try­ing to fig­ure out the best way of being more cre­ative or com­ing up with new ideas.

The most con­ven­tion­al meth­ods are for artists to look for ways of cir­cum­vent­ing the ratio­nal left side by doing things like writ­ing or draw­ing with their non dom­i­nant hand. This is explored in Bet­ty Edwards’ clas­sic, “Draw­ing on the Right Side of the Brain”. The trick is to con­fuse the order­ly habits of the left side so that the right intu­itive abil­i­ties will come to the for front and release the infor­ma­tion it’s using to your con­scious aware­ness.

I’m think­ing more about this because of how com­put­ers have changed the way we artists/designers work and how much it’s effect­ing how we think. For visu­al artists draw­ing is the way we devel­op our skills and put our ideas togeth­er. We per­ceive the whole three-dimen­sion­al image on the visu­al cor­tex of our brains and write it out as an image on the two-dimen­sion­al sur­face of a piece of paper.

The com­put­er, how­ev­er has lift­ed our hands off the draw­ing pad and on to lin­ear tools of the mouse and key­board. At the same time it gives us access to more visu­al and writ­ten infor­ma­tion in one place than ever seemed pos­si­ble. It’s a new dimen­sion of images, movies and the writ­ten infor­ma­tion which has it’s cre­at­ed a new real­i­ty to explore. How does this make us think? Did con­cep­tu­al artist know about this before the per­son­al com­put­er entered every­day life, or was break­ing the world up into data points just a log­i­cal step on the path through mass media?

Inquir­ing minds want to know.