Overview

Each year the AIGA CT hosts a 12-hour design sprint, the Make-A-Thon, to benefit the Connecticut Community. The goal of the event is to work with a local non profit to create deliverables by the end of the day. Volunteers are paired in small groups of various experience and skills to best align with the non-profit’s specific needs.

I was assigned to a group working with Harc CT, a nonprofit that supports people with intellectual disabilities and their families through advocacy and providing community-based services to achieve a great life of integration and meaning. They were in need of a company brochure that encompasses what they do and how they do it. The group consisted of myself and another junior level designer, a mid-level designer, and senior level designer. 

Moodboard

Our moodboard featured Harc’s brand identity, and uses images from their archives specifically showing “happy, smiling” people, as per their marketing team’s requests.

Playing off of the ideas of creating a piece that showcases the magnitude in which this organization changes lives, we wanted the brochure to be light-hearted, playful, and creative. We found an example of a tri-fold brochure that specifically featured overlapping shapes, bright colors, and an easy to follow layout.

I found some illustrations collected over the years from Creative Market showing happy, dancing people. There were only a few people shown in these illustrations, and we wanted to ensure inclusivity in our representation. I ended up illustrating a few more characters to add to this pattern including a girl in a wheelchair, a baby, and a couple people of different body shapes.

Layout

After the team finalized our mood board, the mid-level designer in our group began bringing the copy over to our InDesign document, to start mapping out each page.

During this time, the rest of the group split up the brochure so everyone was responsible for 2-3 spreads. We worked on collecting images from Harc’s archives that we would use in our respective sections.

Above are the spreads that I was responsible for. The illustrations played a role in each spread as a design element speaking for the playfulness of the organization, as well creating a sense of cohesiveness throughout the document. I wanted the “Ways To Give” list to be a bit more dynamic than a bulleted list as it was written in the copy. By turning this into a graphic, and by using the illustrations to draw the reader’s attention to this important cornerstone of the non-profit, I successfully made this spread engaging, entertaining, and appealing.

Below is the final brochure we created for the non profit. This was by far one of the most labor intensive and rewarding projects I have had the pleasure to work on.