Hillary N Kirby
a portfolio site
Dream Project Marketing
Posted on March 25, 2017
One of the core duties as Publications Manager was to help out the recruitment team. With new students arriving every quarter, and mentors graduating, The Dream Project relies on recruitment of new college mentors to be able to guide their students’ path to future success.
Materials used often included lawn signs, and pamphlets/bookmarks to hand out to students as they walked to class. Below is a sampling of my final year’s marketing materials.
The Dream Project Workbook
Posted on February 25, 2017
I was a member of the UW Dream Project all 4 years I was a student. This unique not-for-profit organization was not run by the UW, just located on its campus. A student-run organization, it is a mentorship program where over 700 college students work in area schools helping high school juniors and seniors prepare for the future after graduation. Mentorship mainly involved college applications and career planning.
As a sophomore, I saw the need for someone to take over publications/marketing for the organization. At the time there was no cohesive brand. Materials we either gave out to students or used to recruit mentors weren’t looking as professional as they could. I saw this as the perfect opportunity for me to help out. Within a month I had gone to the governing body and created the position of Publications Manager. I remained there until a few months before I had to graduate. That was when I interviewed new people for the position and hired a successor to train before I left the campus for good.
The main project I took on during my tenure was the workbook we provided for every student we worked with. Updated on an annual basis, it is a step by step guide for a student to get through their senior year of high school, including worksheets, a lot of information on the various options they have, and how to go about planning to pay for their future education- whether that be community college, military, technical school, or a 4 year degree.
Above is a gallery of some of the workbook pages from the 2013-14 workbook.
When I began my tenure as Publications Manager, the workbook obviously already existed. The program itself was 7 years old. It became my biggest responsibility to collect feedback from the 700+ student body to better the latest edition for the next year. Collecting feedback in and of itself is a full time job, but I then went ahead and created new pages people thought were needed and changed those that had been assessed to be faulty or misleading.
In summary, there were many other projects I completed for The UW Dream Project, but the workbook was by far the most important and time consuming.
*The Dream Project is still creating these workbooks. If you know of a high school student who would benefit from having one of these, or wants to be a part of the program, you can contact the Dream Project directly.
Newspaper Layout
Posted on February 24, 2017
While at the UW, I not only majored in Visual Communication Design, but also Journalism. It was through this that I found myself working for The Daily- the campus paper. After writing for them for a quarter, I managed to get myself on their design team. For the rest of my college career, I designed a section of the paper at least twice a week.
This work allowed me to fine tune my design to allow for easy reading. This understanding proved critical to my overall development- many of my peers struggled to understand why things weren’t perfect as long as they looked pretty. Functional design with a purpose- that’s my specialty.
Infographics are a major part of functional design because they allow the reader to understand data without having to delve deep under the surface of the issue. The reporter’s point is given an exclamation point and bolded. I grew very adept at turning data sets into graphics. There was a month where I was falling asleep and dreaming about using Tableau. However most of the data I worked with wasn’t a large enough set to warrant Tableau, and I was usually able to visualize it using only InDesign.
This job also gave me plenty of opportunity to hone my logo skills, as we frequently ran series that needed a cohesive logo to accompany them.
Below is a collection of some of my best work while with The Daily. It should be noted all design was done in a space of maximum 5 hours. So while there may be spacing I’d want to fix now, or a more elaborate design that might better highlight specific articles, the time wasn’t conducive to that sort of intensely critical design. It is nice, however, to see how much time can be a factor in quality, and how much better my quality of work got between then and my more recent designs.
