Hey Everyone!
It’s your local PR Food Center designer, Evie! With my 10 week VISTA opportunity coming to a close, I thought it might be nice to reflect a little on the many things I’ve been able to accomplish during my time here. If you may recall my initial bio, I went to school to study graphic design and digital media. It was the best choice I could’ve made for my higher education, and I learned so much about marketing, strategy, and design languages.
After graduating, working for the PR Food Center provided me with the monumental opportunity to use just about every trade in my skill set; illustration and animation, publication, typography and photography. Even web design! When building a small business such as the PR Food Center, it’s so important to keep all of your marketing collateral looking crisp, and even more so, cohesive and identifiable. That means using a set amount of colors, the same fonts and typefaces, even composition layout throughout both your print and digital materials. All of this, is what goes into a brand style guide, which is essentially what I created for the PR Food Center.
A brand style guide serves as your blueprints and schematics, so you never have to start from scratch on your next design. I’ve applied this guide to the many graphics you may have seen on Facebook, or around town as flyers. We even have an Instagram account now, so be sure to go follow that, @prfoodcenter! One of the biggest projects I worked on though, was in redesigning the website with this new guide. This undertaking was a large part of my schedule, as I had to think first about user experience and informational flow before I even started on the color and type. Making sure that information is easy for a person to find within a page is crucial to a business’ success. So it’s very important to make sure that what you’re presenting to a user is clear, concise, and not overwhelming. So a lot of what I did with it, besides applying the consistent color and type choices, was condense pages a little more, so there weren’t too many tabs to get lost in. Head on over to the new PR Food Center site and check it out today! And if you have any questions, or even find a few stray bugs in the system(which there are always going to be with a new layout), feel free to let us know at info@prfoodcenter.org!
Moving forward, this style guide will help the next VISTA, and the one after that, keep up with a consistent image when creating anything from social media banners, to printed brochures. No 4 year degree required! It’s been such a pleasure working with the PR Food Center these last few weeks, building their image, working together to make choices everyone will love, and using my education to make informed decisions about our marketing strategies. It’s been a great summer, with great experience both for me and the PR Food Center, and I look forward to continuing a consulting relationship with the PR Food Center going forward.