Hillary N Kirby
a portfolio site
Book Resumé
Posted on March 25, 2017
In 2014 one of my friends became an author. She’s also a professional portrait photographer and one of my many inspirations in life, so when she asked me to help her layout the resume for her book to sell to publishers, I said yes.
I like to think that this project, though short and sweet, was a culmination of all the layout knowledge I had gained while at University. She sent the pictures she wanted me to use, and the wording, and I was asked to make it look visually appealing. Within the 48 hour turnaround she gave me, I came up with this:
I’ve redacted her personal contact information for privacy’s sake, but feel free to check out her website- it’s filled with loads of blog entries filled with helpful advice and observations.
This version is not actually the final one she took to the writers conference she was headed to, but it is the version that I was most pleased with. I don’t mind that clients have different ideas than I do about what looks good, I will always create versions to my liking and theirs, because more options is never a bad thing. Often times I find that we’ll end up combining the two concepts.
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.
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.
