NYU CMEP Fall Calendar

Project Overview
In my role as a Graphic Designer for NYU’s 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.

Timeline
August 2024
3 Weeks

Role
Graphic Designer
Content Designer

Tools
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Procreate

Team
Tera Nakata
Anvay Kantak

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.

Final Design

The Calendar in Action!

Also... Stickers!!
After finalizing the calendar’s printed poster format, it was time to format the design to be printed as stickers, which would similarly be distributed at university events and in our office. I experimented with different color combinations, working with our design team to finalize two new colorways in addition to the poster’s color palette. I also coordinated with our merch vendors to experiment with different materials, laminaters, and sizes, and did a bunch of print tests on sample materials that they sent us.

We decided on three sticker designs– a version in the same dimensions and color as the poster, with a glitter effect added to the hands and fruits of the image, and two square versions of the design– one in a new purple color palette printed on a matte vinyl material, and another in a brown and green color palette printed on kraft paper material.

Then, I prepared the design files for our vendor’s printing process, organizing the Illustrator file into different layers so that the glitter effect could be applied to the correct sections of the image. I helped to coordinate the production process, communicating with my design supervisor, office director, and vendor contact to negotiate and approve our order after they sent print proofs.

Final Sticker Designs

TAKE ME BACK HOME