The Task of this project was to work with the WSGC and design all of the collateral they would use for one of their annual grants. The collateral included a poster, a postcard, an email/newsletter, and three social media posts each on Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook.

I was the only designer involved in this grant. I created all of the content other than the WSGC logo. The grant I worked on was the Early-Stage Investigator Program. This grant was designed to support those striving to create initial research data for future proposals. In other words, someone whose research is at its earliest stage and needs funding. Afterward, they would likely apply for one of the different grants once they have data to support their continued research.

The most considerable challenge for this assignment was to find how much of the original WSGC branding I should use. They have a relatively weak set of brand guidelines and could only pull from their website and prior designs. However, they had fantastic correspondence and communicated with me very well. Finding guidance on this process was highly doable.

These colors and layouts align reasonably well with many of the old WSGC posters, though I wanted to use less white on the page and have more color in the piece. However, I wouldn't say I like it. The content is a bit hard to read on the blue and the green, and I generally felt that it wasn't meeting my desires, let alone theirs.

The solution to this problem was quite simple. Many of the designers working on the other grants elected not to follow the WSGC guidelines so strictly, and they were on board with them looking much different and deviating from their traditional style. As such, I knew that I needed to make something simplistic, not space-specific since they do much more, and that was also very approachable and read well.

Once the poster was done, I finally could work on the rest of the collateral, and that all came much faster after designing the poster, as I knew my theme, colors, and style.

The social media posts came in 3 types. Announcement of Opportunity, Reminder, Last minute Reminder. Those were made for all three social media sites, so I will show you one of each type, all from different social media sites, to clarify what they looked like.

In general, I found this to be a successful project. I found the designs to be consistent, thematic, and elegant. The WSGC seemed very impressed with the work overall and used it this year to announce their grants.

However, I would say the failure is that I felt that this set of designs was perhaps a bit too generic and made it difficult to tell the topic of this grant. Given that it covers any introductory level research, I felt compelled to make it readable and unspecific in a simple way.