The CU housing fair is an event held on CU Boulder's campus 3 times a school year that connects students with landlords and off-campus housing resources. I redesigned the housing fair branding when I was first hired as a graphic designer and this was my second opportunity to give the fair a redesign.
When I was first hired on as a graphic designer at this office, one of my first tasks was to update the branding and marketing materials for the housing fair that our office held on campus.
My previous designs for the housing fair can be found on my old portfolio:
https://johnjmackin.myportfolio.com/test-1
After 6 housing fairs, a decision to stop using balloons as decor at our fairs was made. This prompted my supervisor and I to want to come up with a new branding identity for the fair as the balloons were a center symbol of the old fairs design.
I decided it would be an effective idea to use photos of off-campus housing as the center of the design. I grab my camera and went for a stroll in the neighborhoods surrounding campus, snapping pictures of apartment buildings and homes that could be a good fit for a collage style design.
You can see I cut the buildings out of the photos I took using adobe photoshop, then I used each building as a piece of a greater collage design.
After finishing the collage part of the design, I moved over to Adobe illustrator to design the layout and design of the flyers and social media posts.
Following the CU Boulder brand identity, I came up with a layout design that is clean, easy to read, and straight to the point about the event. I choose to highlight the most important content of the design in gold, making sure our students knew their would be free pizza and free TV at our fair, as these two things have shown to pull more students in to the fair in the past.
