Assembled
Senior Show

The graphic design senior capstone show at Iowa State, around 100 graduating students, May 11 to 16. I sat on the five-person social media committee: motion graphic, headshot templates, interview edits.

01The brief

The show already had an identity, set by the event’s creative director: flat shapes, a fixed palette, tight Helvetica-style type. My job was to take those guidelines and make them move: one motion graphic that could run on the screens inside the College of Design and cut down for the show’s Instagram, without inventing a second visual language on top of someone else’s system.

02Motion graphic

Shapes enter, overlap, and settle, using the same overlap logic the static layouts already had, now given a time axis. Built twice: 16:9 for the building’s screens, where it plays silent to people walking past, and a vertical cut for the feed, where the type has to survive being seen for a second and a half.

03Headshot templates

The headshot template gave every graduating student the same frame (greyscale portrait, one circle behind the name, one half-circle carrying the discipline) and ran as a carousel through the whole cohort.

04The committee

Five of us ran the account through the run-up to the show. Alongside the motion graphic and templates I cut the student interview films: short talking-head edits introducing the work, posted in the weeks before the doors opened. Credit where it’s due, Grace, Madie, Sophia and Sydney made the rest of it with me.

The useful lesson was working inside guidelines I didn’t write. Motion was the one dimension the brand didn’t specify, so it was the one place I could add something, and the constraint was that nobody should be able to tell where the guidelines stopped and I started.