New Year 2012 Library Prediction Poster Results

The New Year Predictions display poster results at the end of January 2012.

Just a quick update on the results of the New Year 2012 prediction display installed during January at the Headquarters Library and online at the library's Facebook page (first blogged here: http://librarygraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-new-year-predictions-at-library.html ). Visitors were encouraged to add their prediction for what may or may not happen during 2012 and the resulting participation was both fun and encouraging. As you can see in the image above, there were so many predictions (114 in fact!) written on Post-It notes and stuck to the crystal ball that they couldn't all be contained within it.


On the last day of the display, the librarian managing it gathered the Post-It notes to tally up the answers. You can see the results here:  http://www.aclib.us/research/blog/what-are-your-predictions-new-year-part-2

Creating a display that encourages viewer participation is a great way to engage visitors in promotional efforts and to get feedback from them to see how you are doing. I receive a lot of positive feedback from the staff about displays like this, so I always enjoy exploring themes and presentations that lend themselves to incorporating an interactive, value-added component to what would otherwise be a static poster and message. It's great fun to see the poster continue to visually evolve during the time it is on display.

Design Talk: I Sure Could Use a TUMS

Recently, I was reading an old copy of Package Design magazine. The feature article covered how GlaxoSmithKline—one of the world's leading pharmaceutical healthcare companies—worked with outsourced design houses and component suppliers to redesign new packaging for its classic Tums brand product.

I learned that GlaxoSmithKline's US Consumer Healthcare package development group based in the company's Pittsburgh headquarters consisted of a team of 12 package engineers and documentation specialists (the latter are "information managers who provide product specifications, administer paperwork, and coordinate workflow throughout the corporate approval chain").

Design development of GSK's products didn't actually take place at GSK, however. "We do not do any design work in this department," Ed Dunn, associate director of the package development group said. "We work with design houses and component suppliers to achieve the goals that GlaxoSmithKline brands want to achieve." Together, the GSK group, along with its extended association of vendors handled between "500 to 800 packaging projects a year, ranging from simple label changes to big jobs on the order of the Tums redesign."

Wow, I thought. That's a lot of projects per year. Then I caught myself. Hey, that's 500 to 800 projects divided by at least 12 in-house staff and who knows how many out-of-house people. If you divide 12 into 500 and 800, you get roughly 41 to 66 projects a year per person. Suddenly the work load looked relatively luxurious.

Forty-one to 66 projects is within the margin what I create as a single person design department for the Alachua County Library District each month. In fact, during the recent 36 working days between November 1 to December 31, I created 113 projects alone. And during my first annual year at the Library I created 460 projects, resulting in over 45,000 unique printed page and online views. Maybe that means I'm doing the work of 12+ people—well, 12 of GlaxoSmithKline's at least. I wonder how much they make an hour? I could certainly use 12 times the salary! Or a TUMS. How do you spell R-E-L-I-E-F?

More Black History Month Library Event Design Collaterals

The Library website banner web ad as it appears online.

Newspaper print ad.

In an earlier post ( Library Events for Black History Month 2012 ) I unveiled my design concept for a Black History Month promotional marketing theme, "Celebrate Black History Month: Make The Dream Real." The headline is followed by a tagline that states: "A Dream Worth Having Is A Reality Worth Working On."

One of the 13 branch event listing pages.

The marketing concept follows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and call to action. Likewise, the thrust of this campaign is to also say: "Don't just dream. Work towards it through action. Make the dream real as best you can."

I chose a simple, yet striking photo of the recently erected Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington DC as the focal point of the design concept. A selection of other historical photos of people and events related to the American civil rights movement are also included in an orange stripe that encapsulates the aforementioned tagline above.

The design has been applied to a variety of print and online collaterals in an effort to promote the Alachua County Library District's celebration of Black History Month through specific programming events and general awareness displays.

The same image above was used for quarter page
handbills, and two different sign sizes. 

In addition to the collaterals shown in my earlier post ( Library Events for Black History Month 2012), post highlights a few more applications of the design to additional collaterals:

A youth services A-frame display shelf sign; an 8.5x11 inch print advert in the Black College Monthly magazine; an online blog icon; a 11x17 inch monthly event listing for most of the 12 branch libraries, each with their own specific listing of events for the month of February on the sign; a series of signs and handbills for a specific annual event called: Outside the Book; a simliar set of 11x17, 8.5x11 and handbills for another event: Music & Dance, and, a general awareness newspaper print advert.

Creating a single design theme and treatment helped to provide a uniform and consistent appearance and message to an entire range of programming events. It also helped to reduce the design department workload from attempting to create an entirely different creative concept for each separate but holiday-related program.

A-Frame bookshelf top sign.

Dinosaur & Fossil Books at the Library Brochure

Exterior side of the booklist brochure.

The Alachua County Library District has teamed up with the Florida Museum of Natural History to promote the museum's exhibit Crusin' the Fossil Freeway. The library will be making available materials from its collection and wanted a brochure to distribute to the public. The resulting Dinosaur and Fossil Books booklist tri-fold brochure was created to highlight some of the reading materials on both dinosaurs and fossils.


On a first design concept I presented, I used images of dinosaurs, but the librarian then asked for images relating more to fossils, so I re-sourced online for dinosaur bones and fossils and located a few  offered for public domain use. I reworked the images to take out the backgrounds so they would stand alone as silhouettes, allowing text to wrap around the images.


I also sourced online for free fonts that looked like bones and found a few to try out. For the cover headline, I used a bones font for the word "Fossil." For the word "Dinosaur" I set a horror type face to outline, then imported the texture of a dinosaur skin into it. Inside the brochure, I colour-coded the book names to differentiate between the fossils (brown fonts) and the dinosaurs (green fonts). The result provided a simple and clean design that was visually appealing and easy to read for people of all ages.


500 copies were printed out-of-house on a basic 70lb white paper stock and distributed among the libraries within the district.

Interior side of booklist brochure.

U.S. Citizenship Test Web Banner

Simple web banner image for website display.

One of our branch libraries helps community members study for their U.S. Citizenship test. They wanted a web banner for our website to let people know such a service was offered, so I whipped up a simple graphic that could be supported by a caption line underneath with all the additional details.


 It took a while to find, but I eventually located a straight-on image of an American flag to use as a background. Next, I used a second piece of clip art that showed a selection of people standing together, and imported it overtop the flag. 


Originally, I was going to keep the silhouette people the solid black they were found as, but after placing it over the flag, I was intrigued with the idea of knocking back the translucency of it to be 50% opaque. To me, this could be interpreted as as a visual message of "being 50% here...living in the U.S., but not fully citizens, somewhat a demographic in the shadows, and yet emerging out of it to become fully recognized as citizens." It was simple, yet could have a message intertwined into it, if one was so inclined to assign it one. 


Either way, I was happy to have done it. Within the past year I've had two friends take their U.S. Citizenship test and pass...one from Thailand, and one from China. The Chinese friend I actually spent about eight weeks helping him to study by drilling him twice a week and giving him whatever backstory to the answers I could. He said it helped him a lot and along the way, I re-learned many things myself. Once he was ready, my wife and I drove with him an hour and a half to the testing center to support him as he received his certificate. We were all very happy for him and proud of his efforts, so doing a little web banner--simple as it was--had a special meaning to me.

A Psychic Design for a Medieval Tarot Card Reader

The event sign design was "written in the cards."

In late January, our town celebrates with a medieval festival. It gives the Library a community event that we can build off of for a few events of our own. One thing our youth services department does is display medieval themed constructions of castles, shields, tapestries and the like from a local school contest. 


Another interesting thing they did this year is to have one of our librarians offer tarot card readings. She really knows how to do it from years of experience, so it wasn't like we just plopped some random novice down on a chair and said "okay, get crackin'...make up some interesting story about these cards as you flip them over! No one will ever know!" No, not us. Our reader—we call her Madame Psyche—gave 30 readings during her library event. And even though it was a youth services event, she said most of the interested people were adults. Well, that would make sense to me anyway.


To publicize this event, the youth department only requested a design for an 8.5x11 inch sign, 10 copies to be printed out. I went sourcing for images that had a medieval flair...shields, castles, helmets, flags, and tapestries. I ended up finding a nice tapestry with a unicorn posing over some shields, surrounded by a simple border of vines and shields. I blocked out the inner illustration of the unicorn so that I'd have a flat colour background to lay text over, then added a deck of tarot cards with a few sample cards splayed out in front of the deck. I styled the event text in some hand tooled/hand generated fonts and sent the concept on for approval. I couldn't resist to add my own little clever tagline: Your attendance is already written in the cards.


Not long after, I heard back via email from the requesting staff person that it was approved for print. A few minutes later, a second email came in, this one from Madame Psyche herself. She said she loved it, and in fact, had the very same deck of cards I chose to use for the sign and would use them for the event. 


Now, how's that for "psychic designing"? J

Happy New Year Predictions at the Library

Happy New Year 2012 to everyone! Last year for the new year we asked visitors what their new year resolutions were. We had a great response from visitors and look forward to another round of interactive participation this year. To change it up for this year, however, we're asking what everyone's predictions are for the new year. We'll be asking them on our library Facebook page (www.facebook.com/alachuacountylibrary) and at the Headquarters Library, where our alcove displays a large format poster of a crystal ball, among other interesting things. 


On the book shelf beneath the poster, visitors are encouraged to fill out Post-It notes and place them directly onto the image of a large crystal ball in the center of the poster. The poster also provides a definition of what a prediction is, as well as some suggested reading from our collection of books. Viewers are even primed with a selection of potential our own predictions...from the serious to the downright silly. We look forward to everyone's response and will be updating a library blog post with all the results (and saving them to read again at the end of the year!).


This large format poster at 116x72 inches was printed out in-house in two 116x36 inch sections, then stripped together using double stick tape. Images are a mix of clip art and photographs provided from a variety of sources.

Picture of the display after installation. Post-It notes with viewer predictions
already began accumulating in the crystal ball.

Detail of where patrons have added their predictions into the crystal ball.
A few more days after this shot, Post-Its spread up into the headline
and covered the wooden base.