COSUGI 2017

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The theme of this conference, “I believe in the power of libraries,” was such a hit that the executive team promised to make a store available for our librarians to buy shirts, buttons, bags and such. (see more about that in this post) Besides creating that logo for the show, I also helped build the keynote presentation introducing the theme, as I have every year since 2012. This year’s presentation was 650 slides long, allowed the audience to participate in polls throughout and displayed the poll results on screen, involved several video clips (as usual), and included a few demos. We had a good turn out, and I think we lived up to the expectations:

   

eResource Central User Interface

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When I began this project it was a mess. The engineering department’s only UI designer had unexpectedly quit, and they emergency transferred me from Marketing to keep the 60+ developers headed in the right design direction on this and other projects. This particular project had been abandoned by my predecessor because she and the Product Manager weren’t on speaking terms! Shortly after I began picking up the pieces, the Product Manager also quit, leaving me and the headless engineering team to do our best on our own. We had every reason to epicly fail, but we worked our tails off and came out on top. This was the flagship project in a totally new initiative called BLUEcloud, BLUE standing for “Best Library User Experience.” Had we failed to produce a high-quality product it would have been disastrous for our brand. As it was, our net promoter score rose, and customer losses dropped every year following this product’s unveiling.

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COSUGI 2013 Keynote Presentation

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Whew! This show was a doosy. I built this 3-hour presentation for Bill Davison and other SirsiDynix Executives in the first quarter of 2013. About 6 months prior, I had shifted from marketing to engineering to fill a gap created when their only UI designer quit. Unfortuately, I was not replaced in Marketing (although another UI designer, a friend from my college days named Hyrum Denney, was hired to work with me in engineering.) Therefore I found myself doing two jobs at once during the busiest time of the SirsiDynix year. I was also pregnant. I had a lot of false labor.

This presentation was first given in the Salt Palace in March of 2013. I created it in Illustrator, Photoshop and Prezi.

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I-Comm Student Media Mentoring

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When I worked as a Design Lead for I-Comm Student Media, I was responsible for a group of new graphic designers. I managed the work schedule, helped critique and consult on their projects, and helped grade each student at the end of the semester.

Here is a poster I helped another student create. We worked together to brainstorm the concept, and then when she worked to build it I checked in and offered ideas for improving it.

This is a logo that I-Comm was asked to create for a medical professionals conference.  The student who created the project came up with the idea, and I gave advise about how to make the form recognizable.

COSA 2016 Program

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One of SirsiDynix’s large customer user groups is in Australia each year. It’s known as COSA. In 2016 I had the task of creating the show program. The show was taking place at the Geelong Library, and they had sent our team a set of gorgeous photos to use in our promotional materials. I relished this opportunity. I had another reason to be proud of this project: It had less revisions and errors than in the past. When working with a team on the other side of the globe, revisions can really bog down the process and cause confusion/delays across timezones. I finished well within the time frame and hit it out of the park on the first try, leaving very little to be revised, despite it’s length. Here are several pages from the booklet.

Another note: The logo on the bottom of the first page below (Connect, Inform, Empower) was not designed by myself. I mentored a new designer, fresh out of technical college. She did the bulk of the concept and design work and I talked her through it. The COSA team liked her logo so much they recycled it the next year. This was the first logo they used more than once.

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COSUGI Party Poster

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In 2015 SirsiDynix threw a formal customer party. I created this poster/magazine print ad to advertise the event at our biggest annual show, COSUGI. This is one of those projects that I remain proud of despite the passage of time. It represents one of my earliest successful forays into illustration, a medium that intimidated me due to my lack of formal training. I think it is also a good, early example that color theory has magically sunk into my soul.

Super Hero Cardboard Cut Out

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This was a surprisingly difficult project. I had created an ad campaign about librarians being super heroes and the Event Planner at SirsiDynix thought we should make a man and a woman Super Hero cardboard cut out for our tradeshow booth to match. She ordered super hero costumes and found several fit people to pose while wearing them. The trouble is, very few people are THAT fit. Also, we didn’t have professionally designed super hero costumes to work with. They were baggy in places they shouldn’t have been and too long or too short in the arms and the legs. On top of that, our camera was not really high enough quality to print an image so big. It was a hot, photoshop mess. In the end, I digitally painted / photoshopped these files to death. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, and I think our event planner was too. You can see the lady herself in the picture below, posing behind the cutout at one of our shows.

COSUGI Keynote – 2014

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Every year I work on the keynote presentation for SirsiDynix’s biggest user group. It takes several months, and many late nights, to complete. The keynote itself lasts about 3 hours. I play a big role in the conception and creation. The themes that are highlighted by the keynote in COSUGI are recycled by marketing and sales for the following year. In 2014 we used the presentation tool called Prezi. Flip through the finished Prezi here.

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SirsiDynix Large Tradeshow Booth

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Tradeshow booth design can be a tricky beast. This project in particular, which included enormous banners hanging from 20-ft towers that light up, was a little bit intimidating. The scale is hard to conceptualize, and it’s hard to find quality inspiration without attending a lot of tradeshows in person. This was also one of those projects that tends to influence lots of projects in the future. A company’s booth becomes part of it’s identity. I specifically remember inspiration hitting me for this project in the wee hours of the morning. I hopped onto my computer and worked while my family slept all around me (I had a newborn). I chose the giant, illustrated swirls because we were desperately trying to communicate momentum and change. I chose to focus the banners on short questions that we’d like to answer for our customers, hoping to inspire those who saw it to come and ask more. After the big booth was finished we also did a series of pull-up banners for small shows, in multiple languages. The bottom pictures show several examples in the wild. I primarily used Illustrator in the creation of these banners.

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