Professor Pamphlets
Iowa State university Department of Materials Science and Engineering
In the time that I've worked there, the Materials Science and Engineering department has expressed to me two problems: First, they struggle with visibility as a field that is inherently difficult to discribe and under the radar, Second, they want to increase the sense of ownership for the factulty and students within the department. As one of my first tasks as a brand new intern, I was charged with creating pamphlets to promote the research the department's faculty is spearheading by making a bifold pamphlet about each professor.
This was also shortly after the release of the Cyclone in the Making Campaign, and an application like this needed to look as professional as possible. I spent hours just walking around campus and collecting all of the printed materials using the campaign that I could find, and you'll see their heavy influence in the structure of the pamphlets.
Another challenge was creating the pamphlets in a way that they could also inform viewers and increase the department's visibility, so we are working to use the professors research in laymen's terms to explain by the application what Materials Science and Engineering can be.
Lastly, with something so customized yet so closely tied with scientific accuracy, each faculty member represented needed vastly different amounts of space for different titles and subjects, and so designing a system that could graciously adapt to those changes while also being simplistic enough that a non-designer could make these changes themselves when I'm no longer at the University, was a hugely time consuming and calculating challenge. To further incorporate the sense of individuality, I used microscopic images collected from each faculty member as the background image in each of their pamphlets.
We also created two editions of the pamphlet. The white targets a more professional audience and graduate students and emphasizes formality and research. The red targets incoming students and parents who need a different kind of explanation, and it is more exciting and informal.