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Featured Projects
“The Calm Before the Storm” Football Schedule poster
Bleacher Report ranked this design second in the “Top 50, 2012 Team Schedule Posters.” The design concept is a perfect example of what can come from a collaborative effort between photography and design. Presented with the task of coming up with a design that would communicate anticipation of something “big” on the horizon, photographer John Russell, and designer Mike Smeltzer, set to work. They felt that a strong, single, non-identifiable player would be most effective. They took a powerful and dominating shot of a player. Then they added photographic techniques to ensure that the model’s face would be unrecognizable and that the muscles on his arms would stand out. The anchor, an iconic image of strength, was used to further drive the point. The jersey with the number 12 was used to coincide with unleashing this storm in 2012.
Viewbook
The Vanderbilt viewbook is the flagship publication for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Writers, designers, and photographers collaborate early in the year on the new direction to showcase the university to potential students and their parents. The same style and branded look are applied to other admissions office publications throughout the year. In addition to the main viewbook, for example, there are more detailed brochures describing the College of Arts and Science, Blair School of Music, School of Engineering, and Peabody College.
Blair Concert Series
As a direct mail promotional piece for music events at Blair, the Blair Concert Series book needs to stand out. Designer Julie Turner chose to create a unique, hand-crafted look for the cover, using opaque white, purple, and black inks on French Construction Fuse Green paper, and adding an overlay of pearlized foil stamping in a rhythmic graphic pattern. Characters from the font Hypnopaedia were used for the foil graphic, as well as for the smaller background pattern, and were repeated in a more subtle fashion throughout the interior pages. The book’s horizontal format allowed more variety in the layout of the featured artists' photos.
