marketing

Teaching Graphic Design as Part of Information Literacy

/ dwakimoto

Hello, dear readers! I know it has been a while. It feels like it has been a lifetime. This year feels like it has been a lifetime, right? So let’s just pick up where we left off and talk about design for a bit because that is more fun that talking about how we are going to prepare for spring semester as the pandemic continues, right? Right.

Oh, this has been a busy semester. All semesters are busy, but this one has seemed particularly fraught. I think because I’m bone-weary tired most of the time. It is just a lot for everyone and I’m feeling it. Are you? I’m sending you all the virtual hugs and good vibes and care. We all need some extra support and kindness and empathy now, I think.

One of the highlights of this semester though has been my opportunity to talk to a variety of student groups about graphic design. It has been wonderful and fun even though it has been through Zoom. Though, luckily, as almost all of my graphic design work happens via the computer, it isn’t a hardship demoing and teaching through Zoom (as long as the internet connection holds).

One of the most fun classes I did this semester was talking to two sections of a Health Sciences course on how to apply graphic design principles to their policy memos they are creating in their teams. It was a great opportunity to discuss graphic design basics and show them how to apply the basics to creating visually appealing and impactful memos—plus demoing how even something like Google Slides could be used to create an awesome memo collaboratively. The students really seemed to enjoy it and the professor was extremely happy with the sessions, remarking how useful all the information was and how they were going to incorporate some of it into their rubrics for the memos (as well as use the information to make their newsletter better, too).

So often, it can feel like I’m sending my work into a void, not knowing if I’m having any impact or if what I’m sharing is appreciated or needed. But teaching always brings me back to why I love graphic design and sharing graphic design with others and how it can form a bridge between me and students and hopefully between them and the library. To me graphic design is an important and integral part of information literacy so I’m always excited to share it and show how it makes a difference in our lives and how it can assist us in getting our message across.

I just wanted to share that with you and also share one tip that you can easily share with anyone who is at the beginning of their design journey: when in doubt, don’t center your text. Left or right alignment is better for flow and movement. Resist the temptation. That’s my PSA for the day.

I hope that you have something lovely and relaxing to inspire and recharge yourself this week. I will try to be back again with more musings on design and the library. Until then, be well, my friends. Allons-y, friends!

Friday Design Tip: Using an Editorial Calendar

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week has had some bright spots in it, that you and yours are staying safe, and you have something fun to look forward to this weekend. Today, I want to take a few minutes to discuss the power of an editorial calendar when it comes to outreach and graphic design in your library.

I really love the backend work that makes communications, events, and outreach run smoothly. I love figuring out timelines and schedules. I love making sure that details are taken care of so the big picture, whether it’s a library open house, a workshop, or a new service, can go off without a hitch. I love the interplay between detail work and big ideas and plans that need to work together to ensure success.

One of the things that I really love and that doesn’t get the praise it needs, especially when we’re talking about social media marketing and outreach, is the editorial calendar. Really, trust me, it is so helpful. (And it’s not even difficult to create and use–such a bonus!)

While you can get another tool–there’s so many available for free and for-fee online–to create an editorial calendar, the brilliant thing is that you already have what you need. As long as you can either make a table or use a spreadsheet, you have all the skills and tools you need to create an editorial calendar. So yay for not having to learn yet another tech skill!

So, what is an editorial calendar? It’s a document that allows you to keep track of your timeline for creating and publishing content and comes from (unsurprisingly) the publishing world. This is especially important if you have multiple people working on your marketing and social media accounts so everyone stays on the same page and on the same timeline for the work.

On your calendar,  you can organize when you need ideas to pitch for a meeting of your team, when drafts of posts and graphics need to be completed, what has/hasn’t been completed, and when you will post. Having everything in one place is super-helpful so that no one is caught unawares about what is happening with your marketing and outreach plans and work.

Even if, like me, you are a solo shop when it comes to creating and publishing social media posts for your library, an editorial calendar is still a lifesaver. I use it mainly to track what posts I still need to create graphics for and when I need to publish posts to our social media account. I find it also useful to reference when my colleagues come to me with new events or services they’d like me to post about so I can see where in the calendar we have flexibility and where we don’t (both in terms of my workload for creating the content and graphics and what other time sensitive posts we have coming).

It’s really been a help, especially on days when I have a ton of other work and don’t want to search multiple places to see what I need to post for the day. I even keep the text content (aka copy) in my spreadsheet so I know exactly what is to be posted each day and color-code what needs to still be done. And I just use a Google Spreadsheet for mine.

So I hope this helps inspire you to create an editorial calendar if you aren’t already using one. Let’s make our lives as easy as possible when it comes to the details so we have the headspace to be creative.

Until next time, have a lovely, relaxing weekend. I’ll be back soon with some more news and notes. Allons-y, friends!

 

Friday Design Tip: Customizing Templates to Save Time

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope the week has been kind to you and that you have a relaxing weekend ahead. Today I want to revisit some design topics that I’ve written about before as they have become even more important to my graphic design work as I seem to continue to have less and less time to do more and more work (why is that? It just doesn’t seem right.). So the two topics I want to focus on today (and I promise there are examples!) are: how not to hate templates and how to customize templates to save time.

Those who’ve read any of my writing and posts before know I’m not the biggest fan of templates. From reading resumes and cover letters based on fill-in-the-blank templates to social media graphics to flyers and websites, I’m not a huge fan of templates. All too often the flatten the design world so that everything starts looking the same and nothing stands out. I’ve written before about how templates can also constrict our design work, and not in a good way.

But over the past year, especially, I’ve had to make peace with templates while not letting them overwrite my design style and design needs. I don’t know about you, but for me, the last year and change has been so stressful and topsy-turvy that I haven’t even had my usual (rushed) time to create from scratch graphics for a lot of what I needed to do. So I’ve had to rely on templates and templates, good ones, have definitely saved me some time.

I don’t just plug-and-play with templates, though. I think the important things to remember with templates are: 1) they should save you time–either because you found one that can easily be modified to your needs or you are creating one that will be reused many times saving you time overall and 2) they should always be customized so that your library’s design style and look shine.

So how does this play out? I’ll share a recent example from my library where we needed an Instagram graphic to advertise our student job positions and we needed it, well, frankly we needed it yesterday so I knew I needed to create something eye-catching (because we were competing with all the other departments on campus for applicants) and create it fast (again because of the fierce competition for student employees). So I went into the Adobe Spark templates to see what I could easily (key word is easily!) customize to work for us.

I found this template:

Image of Instagram job ad template with hexagons and icons with limited text

Why did I pick this one? It is simple and eye-catching. I knew I could swap out the icons in the hexagons quickly and even use our logo in one of them to brand the ad. I liked the simple, Sans Serif fonts used and the clean look overall of this template. I also knew I could quickly swap out the colors to again use colors from our secondary color palette.

So here’s the finished job ad graphic we used on our Instagram post:

image of template changed to be branded with library colors and logo along with the job information

The basic layout of the template was left unchanged, but with the colors swapped out along with the icons and logo, it feels completely different. It is hard to beat read for eye-catching and this ad was completed in less than 20 minutes and ready to post.

So, the big question, did this help us recruit students to work in the library? Definitely. It was one of the most viewed and liked posts and we saw and increase in job applicants once it went live.

And, as a bonus, we can reuse this now-branded template the next time we need to advertise that we are hiring saving even more time.

I hope this example was useful as you look for ways to use templates effectively and efficiently in your design work.

I’ll be back again soon with more graphic design notes from the library and other news. Until then, stay safe, be kind, and have a lovely, rejuvenating weekend. Allons-y, friends!

Friday Design Tip: Reusing Designs

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I know it’s been a bit quiet around her lately. It’s not that I haven’t been doing graphic design work for my library or even that I haven’t thought about blogging. It’s that I’ve been exhausted and there never seems to be enough hours in the day for everything. I’m sure many of you can understand and relate to that. 2020 has been a rough year in so many ways, but there is light at the end of the tunnel (and it isn’t an oncoming train!) and I wanted to share a bit before the end of the year (and hopefully will be able to blog more consistently in the new year).

Today, I wanted to remind us all (let’s be honest, remind myself, too), that reusing things is not just about saving the environment by reusing items instead of recycling or throwing them away, but for design work as well. If you’ve made something wonderful, why not reuse it again?

Well, you may be thinking to yourself, isn’t that cheating? Shouldn’t we always design from scratch?

My answer: No! Reusing your designs or parts of your designs is a smart, efficient way to be able to get all your work done, especially now when we’re all juggling a lot more than usual. I know, sometimes we can feel guilty about reusing something (or maybe that’s just me), but it really is a great way to be able to get your projects out the door, especially on short timelines.

Does anyone else seem to be getting last minute projects and hella short deadlines, too? Or is it just me? I don’t think it’s just me from my talks with friends. But short deadlines always make me nervous, especially when I have other projects I’m working on, which is why reusing designs saves my work so many times.

Example is this handout that I designed for a new student orientation. I was told about this a day before it was due, but luckily I had already created a handout for the summer student orientation. So I pulled up that InDesign file, updated the information for our services and resources, proofed it, exported it to a PDF, double-checked the links, and submitted it by the deadline.

Handout for Fall Orientation:

Fall handout detailing library resources and services

Handout from Summer Orientation:

summer orientation handout for library services and resources

There was no way I would have been able to do that if I had decided I needed to rework the entire thing from scratch. Also, there was no point since the design already worked, most of the information was the same, and I only needed to do some updating.

So give yourself the permission to reuse your designs—in whole or in part—and make those ridiculous deadlines without feeling like you want to throw your laptop through the window!

I hope that you have a lovely weekend planned, some time off to relax, and some time to recharge your creative juices. Thank you, dear readers, for being here and reading. I appreciate you. Until next time, allons-y friends!

Friday Design Tip: You Don’t Always Have to be Literal

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that you have found something that has brought you joy this week and found time for some rest even in the middle of everything. We went to an outdoor nursery and pottery shop and bought some lovely, large pots for our garden. It was a nice break from the routine that we are in of cramming together work and play and childrearing and everything in the house. It reminded me that there is beauty in so many small things. Today, I have one thought to share that may help with your design work: we don’t need to be literal.

What I mean by that is not that we shouldn’t strive for clarity in our graphic design work. Our work should be clear in its message and ensure that our readers are able to get all the important information they need easily. What I mean instead is that we don’t have to be literal in how we interpret themes for every piece of work we do. We can interpret them more broadly and creatively while still maintaining clarity and enhancing our theme.

I thought of this when designing the LibGuide banner for our online resource guide for Accessibility Awareness Month. While I could have pulled from some of the universal icons for disability/accessibility or found photos to try to represent a range of ideas discussed in the resources the library is highlighting, I instead decided for something different. This worked, in part, because the banner doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of conveying the information on this page. It simply needs to grab attention and draw readers in so they browse through the many resources available to them.
Because of this, I decided to create the banner you can see below using an image of lightbulbs against a blue sky with clouds.

banner with a photograph of lightbulbs against a blue sky with text that says accessibility awareness month

I chose this image because it is striking and lightbulbs are often used as a visual metaphor for gaining insight and knowledge, which is one goal for our resource guide. A blue sky is often used as a metaphor for calmness, peace, and also dreaming and planning big. So together, they created an inspirational visual for the banner. The text is simple and the font chosen because it is reminiscent of the filaments in the bulbs, tying together the theme.

So the next time you are designing something for your library’s marketing, resource guides, or handouts, think about if you can interpret the design theme slightly less literally and whether that would serve the overall purpose of your design. You may be happily surprised by what you create.

I hope this gives you a bit of inspiration to think outside the design box and that you have a wonderful, restful weekend to recharge and relax. I’ll be back soon with more library design tips and thoughts. Allons-y, friends!

Friday Design Tip: Using Adobe Spark Video for Library Promo Videos

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but it has been a week here in a year that has been quite a year. We’ve had more ash falling from the sky, more fires, and darkened days, which makes it hard to focus on work even when the work is important. I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted, not because I haven’t been doing or thinking about sharing library design tips, but because I’ve been overwhelmed with everything. But, in the midst of all of this, we must continue to do the work that allows our communities to access the information and help they need. To that end, I’d like to share something a bit different: using your graphic design skills in a video format.

You’ve probably heard about videos garnering more engagement than still photos/images and, while I’d never suggest giving up doing 2D graphic work, sometimes it’s good to expand our skill sets and try new things. Creating videos is one way to stretch our graphic design skills.

Adobe Spark, which I love using for Instagram posts (which seem to be all the design work time I have lately), also has features to allow you to create simple videos. While there aren’t as many options and controls as you have with video editing tools such as Premiere Pro, it is just fine for creating short promo videos and highlighting parts of your collection.
I created the video below to use in our Library Orientations during the summer and start of our fall semester. I combined stock photos with simple information about our services and resources, chose a base theme, and added music from the selection pre-loaded into Adobe Spark.

And, I’m happy to report that the learning curve for creating a video on Adobe Spark is much lower than learning to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign. But the results are still polished and eye-catching for your users.

Remember to use your graphic design skills from 2D designing (like rule of thirds, contrast, matching fonts with theme and graphics, etc.) when creating a video, too, and you’ll have new promo videos for your library in (almost) no time.

It’s fun to learn a new skill and find new ways to promote your library’s services and resources. At least, I found it to be energizing during these tough times and gave me some more inspiration for creating library designs when I felt my creative well running dry.

I hope you have a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend. Stay safe, help your neighbors, and be kind. Allons-y, friends!

 

Friday Design: Two-for-One Designs

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well. I hope that you have something lovely and relaxing to look forward to this weekend. This has been quite a week as we are finishing up the end of the spring semester and I feel like every meeting I’ve been in has spawned two other meetings and a bunch of new work that needs to be done by the end of the month. And, I don’t presume to speak for you, but I’m not sure I have the brain space for much more work.

But there is more work, and more designing to do, so I wanted to share one of my favorite hacks for speeding up my graphic design work for Instagram. Yes, as I’ve said before, much of my design work currently revolves around Instagram as it is the social media channel used by departments and student organizations at my university. It’s been a challenge and sometimes quite fun and it has been having an impact on visibility for the library with our students, which is great.

But I still have the same time constraints I had when all this started, so I’m always looking for ways to create great designs that can be used in multiple ways and I love getting 2-in-1 designs out of Instagram posts and accompanying stories.

As those of you who use Instagram know, the graphics for posts are square (an interesting design constraint) while the Instagram Stories are rectangular. Both are useful for pushing/marketing content for the library. And while you can simply use the built-in editing and designing tools in Instagram to convert one of your posts into a story, you get a lot more control using a standalone graphic design program.

I’ve been using Adobe Spark a lot and love the ability to convert the size of a design with one click, which is what I’ve been doing to create the posts and stories for my library’s Instagram feed. Below is an example of a post and story I did for this week, our final exams week.

Instagram Post:

example of Instagram post for library helping with papers and projects

Instagram Story:

example of Instagram story for library helping with papers and projects

Creating both in Adobe Spark allows for more control over the design and to keep the look and feel of the design the same for both.

So, what’s the takeaway?

Figure out how you can use your design in multiple ways, even if you aren’t creating a template out of it. It’s not lazy; it’s smart. We still need to create great designs for our libraries, but we also need to be kind to ourselves so we aren’t designing at all hours of the day and night.

I hope this provides some inspiration and that you are able to continue to use your skills to help your library create great designs. I wish you a relaxing and safe weekend. Keep being kind, keep helping others, and keep showing the world how great librarian graphic design can be.

I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y, friends!

Friday Design: Embracing Design Shortcuts

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you and your family are staying healthy and well. It has been a strange and hard time for everyone. Some days, I feel it is an accomplishment just to get through the day and let’s not even talk about people who are claiming to be more productive than ever.

I’m not one them. I have a toddler and very few hours in the day where I can focus solely on work. If you feel your life is like that, too, or your focus is simply not what it was (I feel you and give you a virtual hug), this post is for you on some design shortcuts I’ve been using to get the work done in a professional manner in the time I have now.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I’m not a fan of out-of-the-box templates for designing. But I am a fan of templates you create for your library that can then serve to brand your services and resources. And that’s the big design shortcut of this entire, emergency remote working situation: creating templates for the library’s marketing needs.

My library already was providing a lot of online services and resources, as almost all libraries do, but with the campus closure we needed to up our online marketing and promotions fast as there was no way for students to come into the library to see are signs or pass our sandwich board advertising the next workshop in the library.

Thankfully we’d just started an Instagram account, which is a popular social media platform at my campus for the departments, clubs, organizations, and individual students, faculty, and staff to get their news. And that has meant that my design load has gone up as every online workshop, every online change needs to be communicated via our Instagram and every post needs a visual.

So I quickly designed the library workshop visuals and decided that they needed visual branding so that when you see one of our workshop posts, you’ll know it is a library workshop from the aesthetic. I kept it simple and clear so it was 1) easy to update and 2) easy to read. Here’s some examples to show you our posts for online library workshops

Instagram post for a drop-in citation workshop showing the use of a template

 

Instagram post for a technology workshop showing the use of a template

While these two visuals look similar, they are still distinct with different color palettes and icons used. But they have the same visual feel, so it is easy to tell they are posts for workshops from the library. I create a flat design, without photographs for the workshops and include the same date, time, Zoom information on each at the bottom. The icons reinforce the topic of the workshops and the typography is simple and clear.

Now that I have these templates, I can more easily and quickly update them for upcoming workshops (good since we have at least 4 a week). I’m also creating visual branding that we can continue for our workshop promotion into the future.

Since we are all short on time and attention, use some design shortcuts to make your graphic design work a little easier. You’ll be able to create the projects you need to for your library without wanting to pull out your hair.

Take care and stay safe. I’ll try to be back soon with more news and notes about how we can continue to do our design work during this pandemic. I wish you and your families all the best. Allons-y, my friends!

Friday Design: How Graphic Design Can Help with Pivots to Online-Only Library Services

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! Has it been quite the week where you are? It definitely has here. I hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy, you are helping others when you can, and you are remembering to take a moment of quiet for yourself. Our daily lives have changed so rapidly over the last couple of weeks that it is hard to catch a breath.

We’re coming up to our second week of shelter-in-place orders and it has been rough at times. I’m continually thankful for what we have and trying to help out others who aren’t as fortunate. I’m also trying to remain calm after the week of running around (figuratively) with my colleague trying to get our online services and resources updated and changes communicated to all our users.

Today, as on most Fridays, I want to share a bit about graphic design. This time, I want to talk about how using your graphic design skills are so important now in a time of rapid change. I’ve been creating multiple graphics a day to share online as my library is still providing every service and resource we can online, including our weekly workshop series, research support, and chat reference services, along with tutoring and access to all our online materials. Even in times like these when it is important to communicate rapidly, we still need to take the time to ensure we follow good graphic design principles so our messages are clear and understandable.

Thanks to one of our Peer Research Guides, my library set up an Instagram account about a week before we moved to completely online classes and then shelter-in-place. (You can see our account at csueb_library.) It was fortuitous timing as Instagram is heavily used by multiple departments and student groups at the university and students use it to figure out what is happening on campus (or now, what’s happening online). It’s been a learning curve for me, but a great way for us to communicate with students.

To that end, I’ve been creating multiple graphics each day in Adobe Spark to post to Instagram. This isn’t the time to create complex, bespoke graphics. This is the time to create clean, easy-to-understand graphics that immediately tell our users what the library is doing to help them. Here are two I posted last week:

image of clock with overlay that reads, no late fees charged on library materials or laptops during campus closure This graphic uses the classic (and easy) trick of overlaying a semi-transparent ribbon in matching color over a relevant photo to make the text easily readable. This was an important message to get to our students as multiple students had come on chat worried about getting charged late fees when they couldn’t return their materials to our closed library.

graphic that says, the library is here to help with 24/7 chatEven before we went to online-only services and classes, many students were unaware of our chat service. This was improved some by our intrusive chat coded on more pages of the library’s website before the campus closure. However, it is even more important students know they can get chat help now that we are online only. This graphic is also very simple, uses a coordinated color scheme, and gets the message across quickly and clearly.

What can you take away from these examples?

  • Find the simplest, clearest way to state your message when posting online, especially to social media.
  • Focus on only one service or resource at a time in your graphic (you can always add more details in a caption/text).
  • Needing graphics fast does not mean you have to sacrifice your graphic design best practices; these are even more important to use to ensure clarity in your work.
  • Even if it is old news to you, it is new for someone else. This is the time to market your services and resources that can help your library users.

I hope these examples inspire you to keep doing the good graphic design work that you do in support of your library users. Remember, clarity and communication are key to graphic design. Keep up the good work and remember to look away from your screen to give your eyes a break every once in a while.

Take care, be kind, and keep on designing! I’ll be back soon with more news, notes, and inspiration as we make our way through this time together. Allons-y, friends!

Friday Design: Women’s History Month Book Display Sign

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? I hope you are keeping healthy and safe. Remember to keep washing those hands and not touching your face (easier said than done, right?). My university has suspended in-person classes this week, but the library is still open so work goes on. It is a weird state to be in, but I find working on my graphic design work allows me to find a state of flow and step back from the constant news cycle for a minute, which is so important. So today I want to share with you the sign I created for our Women’s History Month Book Display that is curated by two of my colleagues.

letter-sized poster for library book display, Our Bodies: Women's History Awareness Month

This sign (or mini-poster) was created entirely in Adobe Spark, which has become my go-to for creating graphics when I don’t have a lot of time [aka only 20 minutes or so to create something before running off to another meeting]. I never like using the templates or layouts without customizing them, but I do appreciate having the stock photo searching integrated in and have figured out how to fuss around with the copy much faster than before.

But what about this sign did I really want to talk about?

Well, I could talk about using justifying type and matching colors and the importance of layout and odd numbers to move the eye. Or the importance of readability and having all the elements of a design enhance the central message. But I’ve talked about that before (and I’ll talk more about that again). Today, though, I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about the importance of representation. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few weeks for a number of reasons, not least of which is that my university is incredibly diverse and I want everyone to feel at home and see themselves in the library. So for this sign it was important to me to showcase diverse women intentionally and not as an afterthought.

And it was a bit difficult to find photos that didn’t recreate stereotypes about women generally and women of color specifically. But it wasn’t as hard as I feared, which shows some movement in the right direction. But we can all do better and be more intentional about representation in our libraries in all that we do. And a big part of that is in our designs, which we have substantial control over.

Representation is important. It’s something we have to be mindful of and intentional about. And that’s part of the overall ethos of design, too. We should be mindful and intentional about what we design and the effects our designs can have on others.

I never saw myself represented as a mixed race person in the library when I was growing up and I don’t want that for others who are growing up now. If I can do my small part to change that, by wielding my graphic design skills, then I will count that in the column of good for the library and for my small portion of the world.

I hope you, too, find ways to wield your graphic design talents and skills to represent everyone in your community through your work.

Stay healthy, stay safe, help others, and I hope you have a relaxing weekend. I’ll be back again soon with more news and notes about designs. Thanks for reading. Allons-y, friends!