The best part about a small town is everyone knows me, and knows I’m a graphic designer. The rough part? Sometimes your to-do list fills up fast. Here are some designs I did freelance, as word-of-mouth spread.
This is a current work-in-progress for a non profit website. We’re actively taking head shots for the leadership page and interviewing the board members to get to know them.
Wilton Alliance was created with the purpose of matching ideas to the financial backing. With that in mind, I designed the logo with bridge imagery—to bridge the gap between future-state and the people that can make it happen. The green swoop is the arch of a bridge, weaving in and out of the town name, and Alliance has been extended to be the water beneath it. Integrated to that is the town hall clock tower that has been used to symbolize the town for ages. And of course the footer of the website has one of the many classic stone bridges that dot the town, to send the message that while the Alliance may be new, its foundations have been routed in New England for decades.
They say a camel is a horse designed by committee, and any designer knows the frustration of wrangling a finished product from conflicting tastes. The Wilton Conservation Commission was fortunately the rare exception, a true delight to work with. They had a clear vision from the beginning, and as soon as I got their preliminary approval for my rough sketch, we were off to the races.
Most ecologically-focused organizations go with a round logo to invoke Mother Earth. We went smaller and more intimate. A rectangle to invoke a post card, a photo…the beauty you would find in your own backyard.
The pandemic was almost a death blow when it came to the 2020 Census. Wilton already had an uphill battle… a third of our residents wouldn’t get census forms in the mail, and now we couldn’t get workers to go house-to-house for love or money. We had to have a concentrated effort to get people to fill out the census form online.
To the right is just one of my efforts. It was a direct mailer we sent out to the town that coordinated with the posters I made, the contest we held on social media, the Facebook and Instagram blitz, and the candy I hand-wrapped with census labels.
All that hard-work paid off! We increased the self-response rate from 2010 by 18.6%. To put that in perspective, our three sister towns topped out at a 7.6% increase.
Wilton is constantly walking a tightrope. We want to be well known enough to keep our businesses happy and thriving, and at the same time protect our conservation land from litterbugs.
The goal of trail maps was to introduce the casual hiker to the land they trod on. Now it wasn’t anonymous; it had a past and a future and people who were looking after it. I was delighted to help on this project, one of the tri-fold maps we have available to interested hikers and sightseers.
I grew up within hearing distance of the Fire Station’s siren. Shaken from a sound sleep, I knew that sound meant my dad was leaving—going out to help some other family—only to return smelling of smoke, hair plastered to his head from the heat and his helmet.
Even if I didn’t have that connection I’d be please to help our town’s firemen. They’re all volunteers and give of themselves without thought. Over the years I’ve designed posters, parade banners, logos, and raffle tickets. The president of the WFRA reached out recently to let me know this direct mailer was a success, resulting in the most successful fundraising year in recent history. It was an unexpected joy in a time when Covid-19 prevented our firemen from selling door-to-door.
File this under “canceled by coronavirus.” For the last four years I’ve been doing posters, a schedule booklet, and a bumper sticker for the SSF. It’s a great event that runs the gamut from displays of children’s art, to roundtables with State Representatives, to seminars on composting with worms.
On my homepage you’ll get a closer look at my logo design, which included a smaller SSF adaptation for social media avatars. The clothesline is intended to have the year change as the event continues, it’s become emblematic of the small changes we can make every day to make our world a more sustainable place. Before we harnessed solar power with panels, we always had a clothesline.
This is the only thing I’ve ever designed to be covered up…it’s a placemat for a pancake breakfast. I know what you’re thinking…”designed” is a pretty strong word for a fairly typical placemat. Ah, but it’s how the art comes to me that makes this a true labor of love. The Boy Scouts have to sell the advertising space themselves. So what comes my way is a motley collection of crinkled business cards…or! Even better! A post-it note with a cryptic business name scribbled on it. And I cobble these clues together, carefully scanning and correcting, until I get a product anyone would be proud to spill syrup on.
I consider this less a coloring contest and more of a parent trap. Next winter I hope to have these handed out by local businesses so we can entice families to check out the winners on our new town website. We’ve found that almost nothing gets traffic like a give-away.
And if I happen to be scouting the next generation of artists? Well, everyone needs a back-up plan.