Food: 'universal yet personal'

(Photo by my boyfriend)

As I mentioned in my last design post,  I co-organized a newsletter for my dormitory this past spring. Well, it was finally posted online last week. You can view the pdf here. 

The newsletter's theme is food, which is pretty remarkable considering how I became interested in cooking and baking only recently. Food seemed like an appropriate, international, and maybe even easy topic to write about because it is both universal yet personal: Everyone needs to eat in order to survive, but what they eat can depend on their culture, preferences, health, beliefs, etc. Food is something that can be shared, which is exactly what people did through their writing in this newsletter. They wrote an article related to food or shared a recipe along with an introduction for why that particular dish is significant to them and/or their culture.

Design-wise, my favorite part is definitely the cover:

 

I wanted to include food-related images that were meaningful to my dormitory, so the four  images on the cover are zoomed-in shots from dormitory events that featured food (Using zoomed-in, detailed images was also a feature that I employed in the table of contents). The arrangement and various sizes of the text visually suggest a dessert, such as a cake on a cake stand. My boyfriend's input was very helpful and appreciated when he saw an early draft of the cover. Among his contributions, he suggested putting a cherry on top to make my intentions more apparent. Plus, it's a fun detail, don't you think?

It was hard not to get a little bit hungry when putting together this newsletter, especially when it came to searching for images to accompany some of these recipes. The Flickr search for pavlova was  definitely a mouthwatering experience that actually inspired me to try making this Australian/New Zealand meringue dessert myself. I used a different recipe than the one in the newsletter, but I'll share more about that in a different blog post. In the meantime, I've left you with a teaser of my pavlova in the first photo above.

International Quiz -- a bright idea

Last fall, I wrote a few times about an event I co-organized called Pancake Breakfast. One of my main tasks for that event was creating the paper products, such as the flier, menu, program, etc. This past spring, I co-organized a different event for my dormitory and designed the paper products for it as well. However, I was such a neglectful blogger during the past few months, so I'm writing about this event now as a way to transition to tell you, dear readers, about my other design projects.

Anyways, the spring event was International Quiz, or IQ, where teams of 4-8 students answer trivia questions from different categories (flags, monuments, sports, food, etc.) about different countries. Most questions are multiple choice, though there are some other questions that require people to write in the answer.

Unlike on a game show, where a contestant rushes to hit a buzzer before the others and orally provides the answer, IQ is totally different: An announcer reads the question and answer options (if any are provided), and there's a PowerPoint presentation with each question, so people can follow along. Each team has its own table where the members can discuss the answer and then write it down on a provided piece of paper that will be graded later.

It's still a competitive game (minus the buzzers), but this low-tech approach encourages interaction with team members, doesn't put people on the spot, and puts people in temporary suspense about how they and other teams are faring. Plus, we were fortunate enough to have fabulous prizes donated to us for the top three teams' prize baskets. Check out a scene from the event itself:

(Photo by SJSU International House)

Going into this event, my co-organizer and I knew we wanted bright blue/turquoise to be the main color. I also liked the idea of having a logo for our event, kind of like how leaves were the symbol of the fall Pancake Breakfast. After thinking of what would be a good symbol for a quiz event, I suddenly had a metaphorical light bulb go off in my head -- a light bulb! Light bulbs can symbolize having an idea, and it seemed appropriate for an event where people would be thinking about a question -- and hopefully at least one of their teammates would have a bright idea for the correct answer.

This wouldn't be just any, old light bulb, though. What about having the world imprinted on the light bulb? Also, let's have rays of light coming from it as a fun graphic! Here's the final product for the flier:

I also made the program for the event, in which the front cover was basically the same as the flier, except it only had the name of the event, the date and time, and the location. The back cover thanked our donors and other people who helped out with thee event (alternating paragraphs of turquoise and green text on a white background). The inside pages, though, were a spin off of the light bulb, except in the shape of a rectangle (it reminded me of a placement at a table):

This was actually the third IQ event for which I've designed paper products (I'll have to dig up past IQ stuff and share that in a separate post). However, this was the first IQ event that I ever organized. All in all, the event was a success (about 100 people were present!), and things went pretty smoothly.

Since IQ, another project I was involved in for SJSU International House was co-organizing the newsletter of my dormitory. I helped edited the articles and did almost all of the layout (minus a little bit of help with the contributors page from my co-organizer, while I worked on other parts). I'll save the details (and share some images) in another post. Why? Although the newsletter was finished close to two months ago (we even shared printed copies with people -- again, this is for another post), but as of this moment, it hasn't been published on my dormitory's website. In the future, I'll also provide a link to the pdf when it has been uploaded.

A design project that I've currently started is the first-ever issue of the SJSU International House's alumni newsletter. This project should be completed by September 1, and considering how I don't have any text for the 8 or 12-page document yet, I've gotten a lot done in terms of setting up the look and feel of the whole thing -- now all I need is some content! I'll provide more details and updates on this during the summer, so stay tuned!

A look back at the last Pancake Breakfast

This is the flier (above) and menu that I designed for the spring 2009 Pancake Breakfast at my work. The menu was on an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper that was folded in half and had the same image on each side.

I was aiming for a retro look and feel with the fonts, colors, images, and shapes. Besides the flier and menu, I designed the program, tickets, and donation drawing (raffle) information sheet.

I'll be designing all that stuff for this fall's Pancake Breakfast, which I'm also co-organizing. The event is on Oct. 25 -- only 17 days away!

Flier: Pancake Breakfast Fall 2009

A few days ago, I wrote in a blog post about fall, mentioning an event I'm co-organizing with a fall theme. After 10 drafts, with some of the changes more dramatic than others, I finally have a flier for Pancake Breakfast!

Over the past few years, I've designed newsletters (fall 2o08, spring 2008, fall 2007), as well as fliers and other printed material for my workplace. While I had some experience with QuarkXPress and InDesign from designing layouts for student newspapers, desktop publishing was something that I got into during the last few years, and I definitely enjoy it (even when it can be hard to go through multiple drafts).

When I check out Web sites such as Wedding Paper Divas, I think it would be great to create things for other people and their events. In the future, I'd like to post more of my work on this blog.