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RISE AT QCC:
Branding and Marketing a Student Support Program:
RISE (Road to Interdependence and Student Excellence) is a student support program that focuses on Career and Technical Education (CTE) students in order to prepare them to be career-ready immediately after graduation. This program is a hugely important resource at Queensborough Community College that was previously not well known. There was low recognition amongst students of the program due to inconsistent branding and marketing. One of my long-term projects was to solidify the branding of the program to make it clean, pleasing, recognizable, and versatile across different marketing materials. I created new logos for both the RISE program and for CTE at QCC. I developed a color palette (of different blues and golden yellows) and visual language (of organic, striped waves) for the RISE program. I then used these basic building blocks to design template email campaigns, flyers, social media posts, and presentation slides for the program that all aligned with the new branding. This ongoing project has been an overall success, contributing to higher rates of email campaign interaction, social media engagement, summer STEM course enrollment, and increased membership in the RISE program.
Color and Style
RISE is a program based at Queensborough Community College. QCC's school colors are a dark navy blue and deep yellow. I wanted to keep the theme of blue and yellow as a visual indication that RISE was associated with the college, but I wanted to work with the hues and tones to make them more playful and eye-catching. In the color palette I settled on, there are slightly more saturated versions of QCC's dark blue and yellow, as well as a cornflower blue that adds more visual interest, and is very distinct from all the other colors on campus without veering into a territory where it clashes.
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In terms of the branding style and visual language, I decided on a motif of waves. In previous marketing campaigns for the RISE program, they had used themes of mountains, mountain ranges, and climbing as a metaphor to "RISE above challenges". However, these themes sometimes gave off the impression that the RISE program itself was somehow challenging. Therefore I decided to change the visual metaphor to more wave-like imagery to evoke rising tides and rising fortunes. The more organic imagery is also often easier to fit and repurpose in several different formats and designs.
RISE Logo Update
Previous iterations of the RISE logo used the imagery of mountains. However, due to the specific constraints of creating marketing materials for a public institution (requirements to have the college logo the largest and at the top of the design, the large amount of specific information that needs to be conveyed in one design, size constraints, etc) these sharp, angular, oddly proportioned logos were not always the easiest to work with when working on a project like a flyer.
I created a new RISE logo using the new color palette and visual language that was more self-contained in an organic shape. This helped increase the logo's versatility and recognizability.
Original Logo:
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Final Logo (My Design):
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Original Logo:
Final Logo (My Design):
CTE @ QCC Logo Update
The old logo for Career & Technical Education at Queensborough Community College was very complicated, crowded, and not easily legible when small. I aimed to fix these problems by creating a simple, bold logo that could easily fit in any flyer, social media, or email designs, while still emphasizing the @ symbol from the previous design.
Email Campaign Templates
As part of the branding for the RISE program, I developed a series of email campaigns and email templates, including specially-designed email headers and buttons that linked to the RISE and CTE websites.
Email Headers:
Buttons Linking to RISE & CTE Websites:
Sample Email Template for New Admitted Students with CTE Majors:
CTE RISE Recruitment Presentation:
Select Slides
One of the most effective ways that the RISE program reaches prospective students is by teaching incoming applicants about CTE majors and programs. This presentation is important for attracting new students to CTE programs and informing them of the breadth of services available to them. It was important that this presentation be visually engaging as well as easy to follow to ensure that students understood and would be excited about the ways the RISE program could help them succeed in a CTE major.
Professional Development Workshop Series: "Email Etiquette"
Select Slides
One of the RISE program's essential services was to offer workshops to help students develop professional skills that would help prepare them for the workforce. These workshops had to be concise, accessible, and engaging. I designed this presentation on the importance of professional email etiquette, as it is a soft skill that many students are not exposed to in their technical classes.
Program Informational Flyers
About RISE Informational Flyers:
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CTE Majors Flyers:
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Local Advisory Council
Subcommittee Flyers:
Video Editing for CTE Recruitment:
The RISE team determined it would be useful to have video resources explaining the benefits of CTE education and the services the RISE program offers. I was tasked with editing and adding dynamic animations to one of these informational videos. I aimed to emphasize the key points the speaker was making to better improve the retention of information, while also staying consistent with the branding I developed for the RISE program.
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