Context

During the summer of 2021, I participated in an internship program with the Human Services Council (HSC), a national non-profit organization. I worked with supervisors from the Norwalk, CT location, alongside a team of college interns. This location runs the Norwalk Mentor Program (NMP) to provide children with academic and developmental mentorship from working adults. The underlying goal of my internship was to recruit more mentors before the fall school year began. So, one of my individual responsibilities was to design a digital flier that would generate awareness about NMP’s fall mentoring opportunities. Our team envisioned the flier being posted to Instagram, Facebook Groups, or being printed out and hung throughout community spaces. I selected InDesign, an Adobe Creative Cloud application as my platform of choice. I was familiar with the platform after using it within an undergraduate course, and its basic design features and interface layout was sufficient for this deliverable.

 

Rhetorical Strategies

While designing the flier, I intended to place emphasis on each piece of text that I needed to include. I established a hierarchy for the most important pieces, the tagline and program name, by first increasing their font size. Their placement at the top of the page guided a viewer’s eyes toward the “absolutely essential information” in order to contact us or just spread the word. Underneath the program name, I included a descriptive statement about the organization. It provides the required time commitment, yet prompts an interested party to seek out more details. The flier also includes 2 images of NMP mentors and students. Having both a high school student and elementary student shows the vast age range of mentees. These visual elements also allow viewers to imagine themselves as a mentor, more specifically the lifelong bond they could strike up with a child from their own community. The rhetorical tactic of logos is demonstrated via the textual information being given to a viewer, while pathos is demonstrated through visuals of real NMP mentors and mentees. The combination of logic and emotion strikes an effective balance for this organization because it directly outlines the commitments and benefits, while playing with a viewer’s imagination if they signed up.

​

The only design constraint I encountered was including the approved fonts and colors from the Human Services Council (HSC) style guide. This was my first opportunity working with a style guide, and I quickly discovered its benefits and drawbacks. However, I was getting real-life exposure to genre conventions and the ways that I could play with their standard aspects while still incorporating my own style. I included as many colors from the palette as possible, intending to give the flier a child-like yet eye-catching feel. My target audience would be directly involved with a very young age demographic, so I intentionally invoked an implicit connection to the program through the use of color. Selecting an appropriate and readable font is arguably the most challenging part of the design process. The style guide obviously provided them to me, leaving a more experimental task of potentially bolding text and changing its size. 

​

Reflection

I believe the NMP flier represents a simplistic, visually-driven strategy of attracting adult mentors to sign up for the fall school year. It directly showcases my graphic design strengths, specifically my ability to prioritize the most important information through placement, text size, and color. I was also able to gain experience adhering to an organization’s style guide, which allowed me to explore the required boundaries within design, as well as the spaces I could test out my own creative ideas. Reflecting back on this deliverable, I can observe the aspects that I would change now, and in tandem, how I’ve evolved in the realm of digital composition since. This flier was also the first (and only, so far) digital piece that combines sales-oriented tactics with nonprofit values.