Undergrad Admissions – The Fun Stuff

Last post, I described my overall position with Temple University’s Undergraduate Admissions. It consists of (mostly) emails that are send to thousands of prospective students, as well as some flyers, invitations, and postcards.

Unfortunately, I have to start out on a bit of a downer statement: I could not get permission to use materials (that I made now or in the past) on this blog. I’m disappointed, but completely understand. However, I have something a bit less exciting but still somewhat interesting at the end.

In the begininning, I was given a list of material that needed to be created with their due dates and a brief description of the target and vital information that needed to be in it. I have been doing this work for the department for over a year, and decided it was time to step up from what I had previously done. I began by realizing that I wanted to experiment with different designs – but they all had to be somewhat similar. I decided that at the very least, everything would follow the same color scheme: off-white, cherry, a deep red, light grey, and dark grey. Every design also had the same borders.

I had a great time surfing the internet for good, bad, and ugly email marketing techniques. Almost 1/3 of my time was spent doing just this. I learned a great deal about how to make a striking layout without being over-the-top. Some of my creations are, admittedly, similar. Some are on purpose – I like to think of them as a ‘series.’ For example, I have a ‘series’ of ‘Temple Facts’ that have identical layouts, but different information. Others, I had more say over. Two of my favorite, part of a ‘Transfer Student series,’ have almost identical layouts as well – but I spent a great deal of time perfecting them. In fact, the two in this ‘series’ were the only two that did not have changes other than grammar. I feel these give a good example of how I’ve grown with using text in a boldly visual way instead of focusing on an image.

My most time-consuming project was a postcard to be sent to student in California and Georgia. I spent hours researching and coming up with three designs. One, admittedly, was supposed to be a joke (I have a very good relationship with my supervisors, which I’m thankful for). It was just a spin off of those “Wish you were here” novelty cards…ironically they loved it, but it just wasn’t right for this. They saved it for later though.

The second and third ideas were what I spent 95% of the time on. One was very simple…elegant, if you will. The other was my favorite – a Philly skyline infused with year-round Temple photos, great tagline… Well, they took the the ‘elegant’ design, butchered it a litte, and swiped the tagline from my skyline masterpiece. I was devastated, but I kept the originals with the edited one for my portfolio.

I know reading about what I’ve been working on without visuals is a bit painful, but let me spice things up a bit for the end. As an added bonus, I got to practice a bit of photography for this internship. About 15% of the photos I used I took myself instead of using Temple’s stock photos. You may have seen me around campus, taking pictures at awkward angles all over the place. I only had my iPhone at my disposal, but I wasn’t too disappointed with the results. I do wish I had a better camera though. Anyway, to finish things out, here are a couple of shots I for the internship. The experience was a good one, it took me from campus…

…to the train station…

…and even to the Ben Franklin Bridge!

Not bad for an iPhone, if I do say so myself.