2023 Design Showcase
The goal of my graphic design program’s senior capstone course was to put on a portfolio exhibition show, where friends, family, and industry professionals could come and take a look at the work our graduating class had completed at our time at Boise State. Among my classmates, I was a part of a team in charge of the show’s branding and visual identity. This webpage chronicles my contributions to our team’s process in creating the look of our 2023 graphic design showcase.
Initial Ideas
Our first step was to brainstorm names and concepts for our senior show. In years past, other graduating classes went with more conceptual names for their shows, which we explored as well, but we eventually settled on the simple “2023 Boise State Graphic Design Showcase.”
Here are the results of my initial brainstorming session.
Process and Refining a Chosen Direction
After discussing all of our options, our team decided to go in the direction of using strong colors and textures to convey a sporadic, energetic, youthful look for the show, reflecting the variety of personalities in our class.
Rather than finding stock assets online, we created our own authentic textures with paint and markers, scanned them in, and vectorized them for use in the final designs.
Here are some of my contributing designs exploring the use of these textures.
Producing Final Design Work
After nailing down brand guidelines, including templates, colors, fonts, and other resources for the whole class to use, we went straight to work on producing posters for the show. A lot of effort went into the construction of these posters, having to laser cut the top layer of black paper and screen print white text on top of it.
Here are some of the final posters tacked up around downtown Boise.
And here are photos of our brand in use on the day of the show! Visual elements of the brand were incorporated everywhere from signage, to vinyl floor decals, to individual student displays.
