During my time at Liberty University
I had the opportunity to be on the marketing team for Liberty’s Student Activities department. As a Graphic Designer, I had the unique challenge of branding Christmas Coffeehouse.
Coffeehouse is Liberty’s largest
Bi-annual student event. A variety show featuring the student body, typically pulling crowds of at least 8,000+ people.
Branding such a large and well-known event was daunting, but I managed to do the most important thing with such a stressful event; have fun.
Christmastime is here!
Christmastime is here!
Holly Jolly Coffeehouse
I wanted to create an event that would evoke classic feelings of Christmas. I drew from vintage Christmas cards, and seasonal illustrations, and managed visual direction that stood out while remaining classic.
While previous Coffeehouse iterations had featured illustrations, we wanted to really push ourselves to feature this quaint Christmassy town as our core branding element, which meant a lot of illustrations.
Oh, Little Town…
When we began conceptualizing the event in the early fall, I wanted to make sure the identity of the event evoked a feeling that was distinctly “Christmas”. As I began my research, I was really drawn to the iconography of old christmas cards from the 30s and 40s.
There were always these sweet little towns featured, that you felt you could just step right into. You could practically smell the hot cocoa wafting from the windows, and I knew that was what I wanted the attendees of the event to feel as well.
Giveaways
When my creative director approached me to do Coffeehouse, we discussed the theme in detail.
”25 Days Of Coffeehouse” was meant to be a celebration of Christmas for the 25 days leading up to the Coffeehouse event, with a giveaway on our instagram each day.
This sparked an idea; why not illustrate each item in our giveaway to reveal each day? And to take a step further, what if we animated them?
It was a daunting task, creating 25 unique illustrations just for a giveaway, but we managed it. Having a new little illustrated reveal each day gave our guests something to watch our instagram for, and really helped to build anticipation for the event.
Below are a couple examples.
Tryouts
Since it is a variety show, we needed separate branding for our tryout events. I went in with the vintage Christmas approach, and we created illustrations to match.
This is an animation our team put together using the illustrations and branding I created.
