Business Casual

Business

Casual

Informational campaign for career services

Completed: Fall 2017

Role: Graphic designer (end-to-end)

For: Northwestern University Career Advancement

Project Context

Prior to the fall of 2017, the required dress code for all Northwestern Career Advancement (NCA)'s events was business professional. Upon realizing that the dress code made little difference to employers and only made the events less accessible to many students, NCA decided to change the official dress code to business casual.

With Northwestern's summer recess ending very late in late September and the recruitment timeline starting early in the school year, there was only two weeks of time to inform the student population of the new dress code. With students having limited exposure to the campaign through the limited advertising channels (i.e. seconds-long still ads on dorm TV screens, graphics on listserv emails, etc),the question boiled down to this: within the short exposure, what is a simple and speedy way to visually notify the students of (1) new dress code, and (2) explain what "business casual" is?

NCA emphasized that the figures in the marketing

material wearing the business casual clothing would:

be gender-neutral
represent diverse races
represent diverse body types

The client presented me with a potential idea of using 'silhouettes' of bodies. The problem with this idea was

that representing diverse body types would remain a challenge, and that it was not an eye-catching image.

Process

I was able to come up with 3 possible solutions to the challenge presented above:

Animal figures wearing business casual outfits
Paper doll of Northwestern's mascot Willie the Wildcat, featuring cut out-able business casual doll clothes
Simplified icons of business casual items

A mock up of idea #3 – I thought the articles of clothing connected by simple addition would be a concise and efficient way to not only present the dress code change, but also explain what business casual means.

Final Product

The client and I decided on the third concept that simplified business casual clothings into icons. This idea most efficiently presented not only the news of dress code change, but also what business casual entailed.

A mock up of idea #1 – animal figures in business casual outfits. I thought this was a very fun way to showcase the outfits without definitive gender and race or constrained body shape.