CASE Conference, January 25-27
Opus was uber proud to see our Creative Director, Julia Frenkle present a design workshop at this year’s CASE D1 Conference at the Westin Hotel in Boston. CASE is the Council for Advancement in Secondary Education and the three-day event brings together development and communications professionals for a series of learning workshops, keynote speakers, and networking. District 1 includes schools from New England and Canada and this year’s conference had more than 120 schools represented by 800+ attendees.
DESIGN WORKSHOP
Together with Hillary Babick, Assistant Director of Annual Giving at MassArt, Julia presented their workshop called “Communicating with Designers.” The design workshop is geared to help people learn the basic vocabulary of graphic design in order to optimize the design process and improve overall design deliverables.
Hillary spoke about the need to be clear and confident in expressing needs and constraints with a design partner. She shared insights on stakeholder involvement, buy-in and the paramount need to be prepared and organized.
Julia provided definitions and examples for five key design principles: hierarchy, grouping, alignment, color and consistency. She talked about how they work together to create a resolved and effective design, and how a non-designer can test those principles as they evaluate the design.
Both speakers stressed the importance of trust and openness in communication; two attributes that create strong and lasting relationships with clients and partners. Their direct mail case study (shown below) was a great example of the process in action with just two weeks available for the design phase.
Having attended many workshops over the years at CASE, I notice when workshops are relevant and really engage the audience. This group asked lots of questions and continued their conversations with Julia and Hillary after the session was over and even took extra copies of the cool handout posters to take back to their institutions. Their workshop clearly addressed a shared problem and provided easy-to-apply, helpful advice. We thank CASE for the opportunity and of course our client, Hillary, for her awesomeness.
