CMEP Fall Calendar

06 CMEP FALL CALENDAR

2024

GRAPHIC DESIGN
ILLUSTRATION
PRINT DESIGN

ROLE: Graphic Designer

In my role as a Graphic Designer for the Office of Global Inclusion (which houses CMEP), I came up with the content and design direction for the Fall 2024 calendar, illustrated the front cover, designed the back informational sheet, and prepared the design for print. Additionally, I researched and communicated with vendors to produce merchandise based off the calendar design.

Project Brief:

Every semester, NYU’s Center for Multicultural Education and Programs (CMEP) distributes a calendar in the form of a double-sided poster to inform the NYU community of the Center’s upcoming events and major initiatives and programs. For the Fall 2024 calendar, the CMEP team decided that we wanted to go in a direction that envoked a sense of bound-togetherness and emphasized the transformative power of community care– ideas that we wanted to serve as pillars for our work this academic year during such a divisive time when many college students across the country are feeling abandoned and distanced from both their peers and the institutions they attend.

Ideation and Gathering Inspiration:

Everyone on the Communications and Design team was tasked with researching quotes that would serve as the foundation for the semester’s theme and inspire the design direction of the calendar. Inspired by a few new food-based initiatives and programs the office is introducing this semester, I started my research by looking for quotes that leaned into similar themes of a shared harvest or bounty, which is when I stumbled upon a quote by poet Gwendolyn Brooks that I absolutely fell in love with:

“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”

It turns out my quote resonated with other members of the office too, and we decided to move forward with this selection! We decided to split up the quote into two parts to use for both the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 calendar designs.

MOODBOARD:

During my moodboarding and inspiration-gathering, I found myself really drawn to the cozy, homemade, and eclictic folk-art illustration and design style and the level of authenticity and warmth it brings to the work. I was particularly interested in the different textures, hand-drawn type, and small elements of whimsy and fantasy that are so present within many pieces in the style– these were the main elements that I drew inspiration from in my initial designs.

Initial Sketches:

Designing and Iterating:

From here, I finished populating the tree with the fruits, stars, and flowers, adding details like shading with grain on the leaves and hands, and continued exploring different type and layout options. Along the way, I continuously checked in with my design team and kept them up-to-date with my progress, and they consistently provided me with feedback and new ideas including changing the pose of the pink hand and adding shading and definition to the fingers and palms.

After narrowing it down to these two hand-drawn font options, I conducted a quick poll of the office and my friends and decided to go with the second type design. A few of the other designers suggested adding some dimension to the tree trunk in order to reduce the dissonance between the flat design and granular shading on the leaves, hands, and fruits. In order to emphasize the whimsical nature of the design (again drawing inspiration from the folk art style) I also decided to add a colorful squirrel popping out of a hole in the center of the tree to reduce the blank space in the middle of the design.

After finishing the poster side of the design, it was time to build out the back side design listing all of the Center’s programming and upcoming events for the semester. I used my illustrations from the front design to populate the edges of the back design, and used the same typography and textures to create the sense of one complete design, even with the addition of so much additional content on the back page.