Me...Jane
Me...Jane
Marketing design for musical theatre
Marketing design for musical theatre
Leadership
Framework
Informational marketing design
Completed: Spring 2019
Role: Designer (end-to-end), illustrator
For: Northwestern University Office of Leadership Development & Community Engagement
Project Context
When Student Affairs Marketing was tasked with advertising the Leadership Framework, we wanted to highlight campus resources that help students grow as leaders. The Leadership Framework is an organizational tool for Northwestern students to develop their leadership skills. We wanted to draw attention to these resources this by distilling the Leadership Framework into a human, relatable campaign.
One idea that repeatedly arose during initial meetings was that “leadership” can often carry overwhelming, stereotypical connotations: the brazen, extroverted activist.
By rethinking the campaign from the Leadership Framework to leadership more broadly, we were able to ask a central question: What is a leader?
We wanted to reframe the word into something appealing to all our peers, including those who might not typically think of themselves as leaders or immediately relate to the intimidating concept of “leadership.”
Process
Upon several rounds of meetings with fellow students, we decided the best way to answer this question would be through real students’ voices and chose to recruit and interview five people involved with the Leadership Framework.
In doing so, it quickly became clear there was no singular leadership experience. We chose to highlight the diversity we saw by parsing through the interviews and using their own words and faces to describe their leadership styles.
Process – Copy
As the five students spoke about vastly different experiences, our priority was to find a common thread through concise, eye-catching copy. Upon several iterations, we ultimately decided upon the tagline of “Everyone is capable of leadership,” which we thought was the most affirmative, universal catchphrase among various iterations.
Additionally, we wanted to lend voice to that statement by assigning adjectives summarizing the students’ leadership styles, such as “relational” or “dynamic.” These adjectives strayed far away from the stereotypical notion and characteristics of leadership, and each adjective was also vastly different from the others, emphasizing the distinctiveness of each leadership type. We added a headline to introduce the adjective, "To me, leadership is..." A quote from each interview was also picked out, allowing the students’ voices to directly explain how they approach leadership.
Final Copy Hierarchy
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Headline – "To me, leadership is..."
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Adjective
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Tagline – "Everyone is capable of leadership"
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Individual quotes
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Additional information – description of the Leadership Framework, relevant links, logo, etc
Process – Graphic
To portray leadership as a universal skill, I used hand drawn portraits to give face to and depict the wide range of students involved with the Leadership Framework. After various rounds of feedback, we decided that framing the illustration in a Polaroid format would be ideal in making the campaign feel welcoming and relatable to a student audience, as well as including each students’ respective, hand-written adjective as photo captions.
While individual is featured on a separate poster, effectively highlighting each leadership style and tying it to one memorable word, it was important that the singular pieces to seem part of a wider project. Each profiling an individual student included little sneak-peeks to the other four students’ posters along the pages’ margins and corners. This holistic approach not only signified our emphasis on more than one type of leadership, but also nodded to the project’s other pieces that the viewer would see on campus.
Final Graphic Hierarchy
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Student portrait – in polaroid frame
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Hand written adjective – as photo caption
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Preview of other pieces – in the background
Final Product
The final product puts faces to abstract concepts and accounts for idiosyncrasy and nuance while pointing to a common theme: Anyone can be a leader. And, by homing in on leadership more broadly, we were then able to communicate the framework itself in simpler, accessible terms. These Polaroids are now featured in posters, postcards and videos that direct students to more information about the Leadership Framework online.
Five variations of poster (11"x17") design
"Interactive" postcard distributed
around campus – where
you can write what your own
leadership looks like
