Graphic design students gain real-world experience with local nonprofit

“Eu posso falar várias coisas importantes aqui pra você. Eu vou falar olhando diretamente pra você, ser boba e até te fazer rir. Estou interagindo com você, mas eu não estou comunicando nada.”

A student might find themselves in a panic and begin frantically checking their schedule if they heard those words coming from their graphic design professor on the first day of class.

“I start the semester talking to them in Portuguese. And then I make all these faces and gestures and then start giggling and things. And I stop and I go, ‘Right?!’” said Clarissa Gainey, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Design in the Katherine Reese Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. “I look straight at them, like in the eyes, I say, ‘Right?’ And they shy away, and they’re saying ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’” 

Gainey then says, (in English this time) “I can say a lot of important things to you right now. I can talk directly to you, act silly and even make you laugh. I am interacting with you, but I’m not truly communicating anything.”

Often to the relief of her students, she continues, “You’re learning a new language to communicate to a specific audience. So when you do that, you need to understand that there are certain things that will communicate to those people’s hearts and other things won’t.”

Gainey likes to start the first day of class this way to drive home the point to students that design itself has its own visual language. Learning that and how to communicate to a target audience is at the heart of her class, Art 4555 Design Factory: Working with Clients.

In this course, students work directly with a client, usually a local non-profit that can use the free resources. Last fall, Augusta Locally Grown was the recipient of Art 4555’s pro-bono work.

The creative process

For this project, students were tasked with making a placemat for ALG’s signature fundraiser Harvest at the Hub, a four-course, farm-to-table dinner featuring fresh ingredients from local farmers market vendors.

“It was a fairly simple piece,” Gainey said. “We had to include a lot of type work in the placemat because they wanted to have the menu, a QR code and a call-to-action. So it was a functional piece. They had to combine elements of illustration and engage in graphics that would follow under the whole idea, the whole theme for the dinner, which was Carnival.”

At the beginning of the project last fall, Rebecca van Loenen, Augusta Locally Grown’s former executive director, met with the seven students to answer their questions. From those initial client meetings, they designed their creative brief and ultimately the placemats the organization requested.

Zoe Beard-Ortiz, a fourth-year undergraduate student from Augusta, won the design competition.

“Having my placemat chosen for the Harvest at the Hub dinner was an incredible opportunity,” Beard-Ortiz said. “I learned the importance of combining creativity with practicality to deliver a design that resonates with its audience. The experience allowed me to tackle real-world design challenges, while also preparing me to create impactful work in my future career.”

No changes were made to her design concept, which Gainey says is highly unusual.

“We really felt like it resonated with the event and the overall feel of the organization,” said van Loenen. “What I appreciated is that it felt like she really listened to the scope and what we were saying and delivered a quality product that we could really bring to the table, literally and figuratively.”

Then Helene happened

When delays from Hurricane Helene resulted in extra, unplanned expenses for ALG, the free design work became even more integral. Both Gainey and van Loenen are proud of the students’ perseverance.

“To have graphic design that was done at no cost to us with a product that could be easily delivered helped us save some really vital funds,” said van Loenen. “The funds from that go toward our educational programs and our veggie prescriptions. So, concerning what we’re doing in the community, it equates to food access. If we don’t have that, we have to limit our programs.”

“It’s not uncommon for designers in the real-world setting to have to be flexible as far as deadlines,” said Gainey. “I hope the one thing the students learned was the creative process needs to allow for some flexibility. It’s always important for them as designers to understand they need to work at a certain pace to give themselves some wiggle room.”

Any hurricane-related issues the students were dealing with at home did not negatively affect their school work. Van Loenen said their professionalism is commendable.

“The quality and the thought that was put into these projects was exceptional,” said van Loenen. “If you think about it, some of them didn’t have power for weeks, and everything is digital now. Some were displaced and had to come back to town for all of that to come together. For them to remember the brief and execute it in the manner that they did and in the time that they did, that’s an A+ in my book!”

Van Loenen added that she’s worked with plenty of professional designers who couldn’t submit on time under the best of circumstances. That valuable practice is vital to their success post-graduation.

“Interacting with real clients who are not designers is very important for students because when they’re in class, they only deal with their professors and projects with set expectations,” Gainey said. “When students have the opportunity to work with clients directly, they need to be flexible and learn to work with tighter deadlines, and they begin to understand that it’s up to them to ask the questions to find the right answers.”

Extra homework

Harvest at the Hub went off without a hitch, just a little later than planned.

Gainey said last semester’s students will wrap up work with Augusta Locally Grown early this year by finishing designs for a new logo and some social media branding for its latest venture, the Teaching Farm. The students took a field trip to the site off Doug Barnard Parkway last September to begin the creative process. Once again, due to Helene, it became necessary to adjust those deadlines, which is just more of the real-world experience Gainey intended.  

“Something happened, and we have to keep going,” Gainey said. “You don’t just say ‘I’m done.’ That’s professional experience for them to understand that things happen, and we need to be flexible and be professional to deliver what we promised.”

Gainey is always looking for local nonprofits interested in working with her students as future clients. She said it’s a good way to give back to the community through the powerful agent of design.