A L T E R M A N I A

Flyer for a club night sponsored by the student government. Had a fun time making musical notes out of cherries.

Home page banner design for the awesome nonprofit charity I’m currently interning at, DonorsChoose.org (as seen on the Colbert Report).

The science behind the copy:

For the headline, I wanted something catchy, cheerful, and evocative of generosity. I went with alliteration to cover the catchiness, the word “celebrate” to add cheer, and “learning” as a way to activate a prosocial mindset without referencing money. I recently read a psychological study mentioning that when words dealing with money are referenced, people tend to weigh extrinsic rewards (like recognition or avoiding negative evaluation) for charitable donations. On the other hand, when faced with verbs like “share” and “volunteer” and “support” people donate for intrinsic reasons (i.e. empathy, resultant feeling of well-being, etc.). Thus, I tried to stay away from words like “donate” and “give,” which have more monetary connotations. (On the other hand, both “donate” and “give” might have been more direct.)

In the byline, I wanted to offer the donor a chance to become part of a category (“*become* a supporter”) rather than pushing a one-time action (“support”). Another study I read and a social psych lecture I recently heard talked about the power of rewarding a disposition, or someone’s character – as opposed to rewarding a single behavior. This encourages future giving, since the donor thinks to themselves, “I am a supporter of year-round schools,” instead of “I supported year-round schools.” Again, with the word “support,” I tried to stay away from associations with money.

Finally, I put “today” at the end to add a sense of immediacy, so users won’t simply look at the message and put their donation off until later.

Design-wise, I wanted a celebratory, summery, childlike aesthetic to match the message. After a few iterations, I included “summer projects” with a button to make the banner more clickable.

Submission-garnering flyer for Macaulay Arts Night.

Promo vid I made in After Effects for the Macaulay Arts Night event I threw with my friend Mary Williams on March 6th. The vid helped both Septopus and our event page gain a pretty big following.

To promote Macaulay Arts Night, I took Septopus to Facebook with the help of co-director Mary Williams. What we found is that using characters is an extremely effective way to spread event awareness. Why? People find characters entertaining to interact with. They won’t just skim over important messages broadcasted by the character, because they’re fun to read! The Septopus now has over 500 Facebook friends – most of them in the Macaulay Honors College – so we’ll probably continue to use him to promote future endeavors. His British persona and love of scholarship turned out to be an unexpected viral hit.

The Septopus’s activity feed, showing updates and comments from Facebook friends. It also features the Arts Night website, which hosts pictures of the event.

Septopus’s personal info. As you can see, we have him linking to other student initiatives, like the Macaulay Literati Club.

Septopus in his worldly travels.

An entertaining interaction between Septopus and Macaulay student and Arts Night contributor, Gloria Cavallero.

In addition to Septopus, we also created a Facebook group and Facebook event to help mobilize contributors, curators, and attendees. The online campaign, along with the efforts of volunteer curators and my co-director Mary helped make Arts Night a success with attendees numbering in the hundreds.

To attract creative submissions for Macaulay Arts Night, I targeted Macaulay Honors students by propagandizing our honors lounge. In addition, the team and I garnered submissions with Facebook and a central Gmail account accessible by all volunteer curators. The Gmail aspect turned out to be indispensable: it allowed us to organize and sort submissions through labels, filters, and a google doc spreadsheet database; create an online submission form; and publish submission guidelines.

Giant block poster made from 9 pieces of printer paper. To the right are some smaller flyers for students to take.

I set the default home page on every computer to the Septopus video.

Some book-holders I set up and filled with flyers.

Flyer hung from the ceiling with masking tape.

I hung it up here for the night contrast between the pink background and the bright green foreground.

A picture of Septopus I taped up on an honors lounge window from outside. Sadly, nobody let him in.

Flyers for the Macaulay Arts Night event I helped run. The one on the bottom was the color, internet version, designed specifically for catching a user’s eye as a Facebook thumbnail. The flyers feature the Septopus silloutted in white (by that point, the shape of the Septopus had become familiar to pretty much anyone who would see the flyer).

Poster for a Nas concert sponsored by the Undergraduate Student Government. Created for postcard and big poster formats.

Design for a poker party sponsored by Fox 20th Century and the Undergraduate Student Government. The poker theme comes from the fact that the upcoming X-Men Origins film features the card-throwing mutant, Gambit. We’re thinking of printing up some playing cards with the image of the flyer on the front.

Only had about 30 minutes to finish this one – flyers had to be hung up around school that day. Whew.