We were commissioned to do some fun design work last week.
One of my non-prof clients, Engineers in Action, is celebrating their first annual banquet next week, April 2. The event is called “A Night in Bolivia.” Every time I read that I think of “A Night in Tunesia.” The goal was to create a custom header, some cool treated-type for different donor levels, and a “Proud Supporter” medallion for event donors to place on their site.
So, first up, here are the graphics we created for them, starting with the header:
The image was a night shot of the La Paz area in Bolivia. We color-treated the image with hues taken from traditional Bolivian clothing to tie the ethnicity of the indigenous people into the composition. Next we overlaid a map of Bolivia to subtly convey the geographical area we were depicting. The compass in the bottom right was added, well…because it reminded us of Indiana Jones, and adventure. Sue us, it’s fun.
Next up are the donor level graphics:
Oh man, get this: these objects are “headers” for the different donor levels offered at the event. They chose Gravel, Asphalt, Concrete and Generator as an industry-insider humor touch (which I fully support in my clients).
All of these items are frequently used by civil engineers in their work, and they’re arranged here in order of price per capita. In other words, gravel is the least expensive item per unit, followed by asphalt, etc.
Hyuck, hyuck. I love it.
Since we were going with a civic engineering theme, I started with a strong typeface that spoke reliability, durability and engineering. Next, I used high-res images of each object represented by the text, and used them as an image mask to make each level feel like the avatar of the item it represented.
The exception was “generator,” where I used a bolt of lightning as the image mask. Everyone I show this to flips over the lightening. My personal favorite would have to be the Gravel image. It looks so eclectic compared to the rest of them.
Lastly, we created a donor medallion, to be given to donors for permanent use on their site if they chose the Generator level of donation.
First of all, there’s a llama on this medallion, and that is 9 kinds of awesome. Second, when a client asks for a medallion, what they want is usually something in gold or silver metallic, which is the traditional American idea of an award, something shiny!
However, since the purpose of this non-prof is to provide aid to a very poor but talented nation, we created a medallion to represent something the indigenous people might actually create: tooled leather. I’m super-pumped about the end result. It gives the client something very custom and unique that they can share with their sponsors.
Even better: donors also get a link to their site from the Donors page of the Engineers in Action website. The medallion on their site links back to the Engineers in Action site. That’ll help generate traffic and publicity for both the donors and the non-prof, in addition to building their Google Pagerank.
All of this was done by Aqua Vita Creative in response to an emergency request by Engineers in Action in less than 24 hours. Boo-yah! Who’s bad? We’re bad.
