Growing up, I always had an interest in art.  My mother worked at the local arts center until the time I was about ten, so my mornings before school were often spent wandering the galleries.  It also meant that I started enrolling in art classes at an early age and have been taken classes on everything from pastels to jewelry casting.  As a result, I have developed an eye for design. 

So it was a logical step that before I started as Director of Marketing and Communications, I became proficient in Adobe Creative Suite to bring creative capabilities in-house.

Scroll through a few of my graphic design projects below.

Anniversary Gala

When the chair for the tenth anniversary gala I was throwing requested that the theme for the public school fundraiser serving North and West Philadelphia be “Studio 54”, I knew I had to come up with an idea that would capture this spirit and be more palatable to our Board.  By connecting her idea to KIPP’s mission of helping students “up the mountain” to and through college, I came up with the theme “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, an event that showcased the amazing students where fun was had by all.  The poster above served as one of the favors sent home with attendees to commemorate the event.

Website Redesign

One of my first major projects during my time at KIPP Philadelphia was to redesign their long-outdated website.  I wanted the new site to reflect the bright palette and large, focused, sunny photographs that were signatures of KIPP’s national brand.  After digging into the analytics, I reworked the navigation to adapt to user behavior and make information being sought easier to find.  Much of the content was deleted or greatly cut down to allow the colorful banner photos and bright infographics to draw the reader's attention.  The other main objective for the project was to create a site that could be dynamic, easily updated without requiring a significant amount of time in an environment where capacity is always stretched to the fullest, requiring constant prioritization. 
Integrating social media feeds that were a hit with both parents and supports and a carousel of easy-to-edit drop-in banner photos became a practical and sustainable solution to the homepage design.

 ANnUAL REPORT

This is the first annual report KIPP Philadelphia Schools published.  Telling Mia’s journey from a 5th grader from North Philadelphia through her freshman year in college where she is playing football, caring for livestock, and learning to become a large animal veterinarian became the framework for this 2015 perspective.  I created colorful infographics to communicate and highlight a few key impactful statistics and wrote succinct copy to allow the focus to stay on Mia, while keeping the layout visually interesting.

HYPE VIDEO

KIPP hosts an annual summit bringing together teachers and administrative staff from all 24 regions for a week of inspiration, team building, and professional development.  The summit kicks off with an opening ceremony where each region is announced during a roll call.  For the 2014 summit, the planning team decided to try something new by requesting that each region create a brief video to be played during the ceremony.  Inspired by the Philadelphia-based classic, Rocky, I created this video using
an SLR camera, Garage Band, and iMovie.