KAITELYN PLOUDE

Southcoast Education Summit

In 2017, the Bristol County Chamber Foundation supported by BayCoast Bank, Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the Carney Family Foundation organized a series of regional training programs for educators centered on social-emotional learning. The goal of this collaboration was to bring together educators from across the region to engage in professional development, to share best practices, and to integrate proven tools and strategies to support local students’ social and emotional development. This free program, which takes place annually at Somerset Berkley Regional High School, is open to educators, education support professionals, administrators, and school committee members.

Once this collaboration selected a date for the first annual Southcoast Education Summit, the event was in need of some marketing materials. First, the event needed a logo. Since the target audience of the training programs was educators and school professionals, I decided to use primary colors and an apple for the logo’s icon. Instead of a leaf in the apple, I included a heart to symbolize the passion and care teachers have for their students. The collaboration requested that supporting organizations be represented in the logo. This posed a great challenge since I didn’t want to over clutter the logo either. I included a pencil to differentiate the supporting logos from the event’s logo and used a sans serif font to keep the lines of the logo as clean as possible.

When it came to the event booklet, the committee was challenged with securing all the speakers and workshops in time. Simplicity was key to the design of the booklet in order to meet the short deadline and get it to print in time for the event. The booklet also had to share a lot of information with a diverse audience of educators, administrators, and other school personnel across multiple school districts. It was imperative to offer an easy way to find various layers of information for the event. One innovative concept to strategically solve this information overload problem was to utilize a color-code system. Through simple information formatting and the use of a color-coded design system, the design is able to create a practical approach to communication. Using industry-standard tools like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, this design was ideal for print having a presentation of this information in-hand was critical in the success of the event. This project not only demonstrates the ability to balance aesthetic and functional needs, but also the ability to adapt and develop print media quickly while still effectively communicating the message to the target audience.