Author: gwill

Great team project. Six student teams pitching against each other for their final assignment of the semester. Thank you to Chris and Maggie at Simantel, and especially Doug and Eileen for your vision for the BIG PICTURE initiative.

MARKETING GOALS
The focus of the project at hand is to promote The Big Picture Art Festival. This festival’s success is dependent on getting people to attend and participate in the festival as it is intended to be an interactive experience. It is very important to our organization that under-served areas of our community are also informed about the event, encouraged to participate and feel welcome and needed. We would like to increase public participation and attendance at the festival by appealing to the entire region, not just local Peoria residents.

In addition, consideration for the wayfinding system on the day of the festival, as well as possible ways to track the number of guests attending.

Continue reading “‘Big Picture’ Peoria Street Festival”

Single Serve is Here to Stay (c/o The Hartman Group)

Certain categories of multi-serve packaged food seem to have some staying power with 3+ person households, primarily because certain brands have enough habitual brand loyalty and appeal within homes that they empower food sharing and result in very rapid consumption rates at the weekly level. Multi-serve packaging makes eminent sense to these consumers, because there is very little time for these foods to go stale once the big bag gets opened. Potato chips are a good example in larger households.

But as America’s households increasingly involve 3 or fewer people, the scope for multi-serve packaging itself starts to look quite bleak. And because the variety of packaged foods has increased, thanks mostly to the rapid influx of specialty foods in recent years, there is so much variety at home these days in packaged “staple” goods that we often rotate frequently between products at the weekly level. This makes it even harder to predict when that large bag of chips or that liter of soymilk will really get finished before they go bad.

Single serve packaging is fulfilling an unmet need to manage waste and to acknowledge our increasingly individualistic eating patterns in a highly fragmented, fickle culture of eaters who think that every day is a good day to try something new in the world of food.

So, the brief was to create a single serving meal packaging/container for a ‘gourmet’ quality meal. It should securely hold three or four meal items, have strong shelf appeal, but also have taken into consideration its environmental footprint.

Continue reading “(Gourmet) Meal For One Packaging”

All promotions for this classic of English literature have been done to death, so what better way to approach such a defined period piece than with a pop art theme!

Adapted by Kate Hamill from the novel by Jane Austen

Never out of print since its 1807 debut, Jane Austen’s classic first novel comes to vibrant life in this acclaimed stage adaptation. Facing bleak prospects, the disinherited young Dashwood sisters discover love, endure heartbreak, and achieve triumph as England swerves between the reason (“Sense”) of the late 18th century and the surging romanticism (“Sensibility”) of the 19th. An indelible gallery of lovers, rogues, greedy in-laws, generous friends, and witless twits, are rendered with Austen’s spectacular language and benevolent humor, and staged with ingenious theatricality and style.

Performances Thurs-Sat, 7:30PM and Sundays at 2PM

Thursday-Saturday 7:30 pm, Sunday 2:00 pm
The Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts
1423 St. James, Peoria, IL 61625

Heinz (Ketchup) is 150 years old this year. The brief was to create an integrated campaign that put this iconic superstar of the condiments center stage instead of a supporting role.

Continue reading “Heinz Ketchup 150th Anniversary”

Next branding brief for our junior graphic design students – Heinz Tomato Ketchup. 150 years old this year. Put it center stage instead of the support act to a meal. Give it the recognition it deserves. Celebrate its past 150 years and make it an irreplaceable brand for the next 150 years…. easy!

Step one: Brainstorn the brand. Nothing better than a good old mind map.

Always good to start the semester with a good intro to Brand Experience – and what better way than with a ‘Self-Branding’ assignment. As always, students are trying to create a beautiful, tactile branded resume package with the intention of it landing on the desk of an individual creative head for a potential internship position.

Continue reading “Resume ‘Experience’”

As always, great fun creating the promotional piece for the latest theatre production – Silent Sky.

THE STORY OF STELLAR WOMEN WHO MADE ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES

Bradley University Theatre proudly opens its spring season with Silent Sky, Lauren Gunderson’s, acclaimed play about Henrietta Leavitt, the early 20th-century astronomer whose discoveries forever changed the way that we understand the universe.

Henrietta Leavitt, invited to join a staff of women “computers” at the Harvard Observatory, left her home and family in Wisconsin and distinguished herself in the shadow of male superiors who not only forbade her to touch a telescope but often took credit for her pioneering work. At a time when the Milky Way was commonly believed to comprise the entire universe, Leavitt and her female colleagues studied photographic plates of the stars, laboriously cataloguing them, calculating luminosity and searching for patterns. Leavitt’s unwavering examination of blinking stars, or Cepheids, led her to discover that light could be used to determine the distance and size of the stars in our galaxy—and tell us not only that the universe is infinitely larger than we believed, but also exactly where in its vast reaches we live. These crucial discoveries provided the foundation for the work of later, better-known astronomers, including Edwin Hubble.