Part 1

My name is Colleen Bell Craig, and I am a Human Computer Interaction major with a double-minor in Journalism and Editing. I do a lot of editorial, logo, and advertising design, as well as typography. Most of my work is done in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, but I often use tools like Canva for social media graphics. 

While I do look back and cringe at many of my early designs, some works from my freshman and sophomore years are still “good” today. The works shown here are a few of the first “practical” designs of my college career. The squid graphic is one of the first things I designed at Whitworth. It was featured on the Village and Stewart hall sweatshirts that year, as well as on our homecoming banner. The logo is for an alterations and mending business my best friend and I nearly started out of our dorm rooms. These designs came with limitations: the t-shirt needed to be a single color print and not too detailed, the logo needed to be easily scalable and have a classic, timeless feel. For both, simplicity was key. Thus, they represent the beginning of my foray into working within style guides and for clients, and began to turn my artistic style toward the minimalist end of things. The result is works that, years later, I am still proud to show.

Part 2

As I progressed in my education, I began to work on more advertising and marketing projects. In the fall of 2018, I had the opportunity to work for an outside client, Whitworth Church, creating a marketing suite for their kids’ program. After meeting several times with the children’s director, Cara Cavicchia, setting out expectations, desires, and needs, I produced the flier shown here. Cara loved it, and it also won a 2019 Spark Award from the Spokane MarCom Association.

I’ve also done some advertising work for my own activities and projects. The bookHoard ad shown here was a project pitch for my Mobile Applications Development class, the proposed app being a literature-based social media platform. The other ad is for the Whitworthian, Whitworth’s student newspaper. For the last three years I have edited and managed digital content for the paper, which has included ad work. In the production of ads like these, I often use stock photography as a placeholder, but the final product shown here uses my own photography. 

Part 3

One of my favorite tools in graphic design is the brand guide. Preset style rules create an element of challenge, and it’s just plain fun to find creative solutions within these limitations. Even in my personal work, the first step to creating a design is to choose fonts and a color palette. 

Another thing I enjoy is satire- and you’ll find nothing makes satire better than following the branding guidelines of the thing you’re parodying. The following works are a couple of tongue-in-cheek pieces I’ve done this year.

This year for the Whitworthian, I got to participate in choosing some new fonts and revamping the layout and design guidelines. These guidelines are reflected in our print editions as well as in any infographics and in-house ads that appear in the paper. The infographic shown here is one I did for this year’s April Fools’ edition of the Whitworthian, which was unfortunately not published due to the campus closure. The copy as well as the art are my own composition.

As I’ve been involved in club leadership and student media, I’ve become more invested in – and disillusioned by – ASWU. Sometimes, during election season, it just seems all of the candidates are saying exactly the same things. It’s with this in mind that I set out to design the most generic ASWU campaign poster possible. The poster, shown here, follows both the Whitworth branding guidelines and the seemingly-prescribed talking points of the campaign.

Part 4

As an HCI major with editing and journalism minors, to say I’ve done my fair share of website and periodical design would be an understatement.

News and magazine layouts are some of the most fulfilling pieces of design work I’ve done. In addition to my work at the Whitworthian, I took an internship in the summer of 2019 at The Spokesman-Review, designing web layouts for their Further Review features, and I quite enjoy designing fictional magazines and websites on my own time.

The magazine cover shown here was a fun project. The design process included first picking a theme and “mood”, then the name reflecting that, then the colors and fonts, and so on. The result is a brand guide I could use to produce further issues of Nosh—although I’ll not wax poetic about my love of brand guides here. See last week’s post for that!

The website mockups here are another project I used to challenge myself with mood and branding. The objective was to create three different moods using only color. Everything else—fonts, photos, logo—are the same. This, too, shows the importance of consistent branding and vision when approaching a design. (There I go again with the brand guides…)