As the main musical tasks were done, I had several side tasks that needed to be completed. Most of these were done this week.

Our producer wanted business cards for the entire creative team, however she wanted custom ones and not just template based, Photoshop ripoffs. The goal was to create a clean looking, marble with golden lines texture, which would serve as the background for the business cards.

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The golden lines were difficult to get right, I didn’t want them to look cluttered, so I went about them one by one, thinking I would connect them perfectly and work out the details later, but when I realised that it’s difficult to connect them and later on change them I redid most of them and made sure they were in the exact spot I wanted before starting on the next one, as moving to correct 1 line meant you had to move all the connected lines as well. After getting it right I added a marble background, and the text for each person of the Creative Team and finished the business cards up.

The next task was the bookmarks and the notebooks. As a way to remember the journey the cast members took together to setup an entire musical and do a tour, the Creative Team wanted everyone to get a HAIR themed notebook and bookmark.

I used the designs for the HAIR poster, and made them into a bookmark, the main element was already there, but the typography, mockup of elements and other work was done by me, the same goes for the notebooks.

This is how the notebook turned out, it is very detailed and looks great in real life.

Next to the work for the musical, my Internship Coach Martin send me off campus to make pictures of the city of Blagoevgrad. The point of the pictures was to capture Blagoevgrads beautiful hidden spots, to show off its features and it’s main points of attraction. These pictures might be used for marketing purposes later on, I spent a lot of time outside in the sun, making sure I got the right angles and lighting, here are some of Martin and mines favorites.

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As the Musical was coming up, we also needed playbills, this meant that I had to create portrait pictures of the entire cast so we could show their faces and explain their roles for the musical. The editing took some time but definitely not as much as the profile pictures.

After these were finished I started using them for our website, we already had the framework from last years website but I had to edit all the info, pictures and sponsor logos. This took most of my time during the first week, but I got it done on time and if you want you can still go to the site and take a look for yourself: http://www.aubgmusical.com

Here are some screenshots of the site:

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We also started using the profile pictures I made for the cast introduction posts we were uploading on our social media platforms, as it was important to upload a steady amount of posts to keep people interested and engaged with the club and the project, here are all the cast introduction pictures I made:

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These two weeks were completely dedicated to getting the site up and running, contacting companies to get their logos, adding them in the right spots according to their sponsorship rank, getting rid of last years info, figuring out how to work in the framework of this site, there were a lot of different tasks and meanwhile I was trying to cram the character introductions in between this, it might not look like much here but it was.

As we were coming up to the Job Fair we needed signs for the booths the companies would prepare, as I mentioned earlier the companies got separated into 3 ranks, Platinum, Gold and Silver, so to show this on the booth signs I had to come up with some symbols. I had a good concept of what I wanted from the start so I put together my idea straight away and Martin was happy with what I made, we ended up with these symbols:

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After this we needed an actual design for the Booth Signs, I started off with some very basic ideas:

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At this stage of the task we settled on the second one, however the layout of the logo,the name of the company and the sponsorship rank wasn’t figured out yet. We also had to figure out what to do if the name of the company was very long like Societe Generale Expressbank instead of Ubisoft Sofia, so I experimented with that too, some of these still feature last years sponsorship rank symbol:

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We couldn’t really settle on anything as it didn’t look right to us, so Martin proposed we would try it again with a different design and layout, I started again and came up with these:

Martin liked the weaved yellow rectangles a lot, he just wanted to fix the position of the AUBG and Job Fair logos and to make the name of the company less wide. The second picture is the final design we ended up with.

After finalizing the design I got the task of creating the Booth Signs for all 52 companies, making sure I had the right sponsorship package rank for each company. This concluded the work on the Job Fair.

After finishing the Resume Book poster we needed an actual poster for the Job Fair, the first task for this was working on smoothing out the elements on and around the existing Job Fair logo.

Since the Yellow in the Resume Poster was introduced this year, my idea was to bring it back as a major part of the Job Fair poster and therefor, the logo. The 3 colored balls represent the ‘Smartversity’ campaign that AUBG has been running and promoting, the Job Fair is obviously a big part of this campaign so we used the 3 colored balls a lot in the logo. After the logo I started work on the actual poster.

This is the first version of the poster, however Martin decided it was too cluttered and the text wasn’t out there enough. This had been the most problematic part of this task from the start as the main font AUBG uses for marketing purposes (the Hero font), is not extremely eye catching of itself. So we decided to get rid of the tagline and to declutter the poster by putting the logo lower and by giving the main important elements more whitespace:

Since we didn’t know which companies would be attending yet, the part of the poster designated for the logos of the sponsors was still empty. After finishing up the Job Fair poster we also created a Facebook event which needed a cover photo, so I quickly threw one together:

As mentioned, we didn’t know which companies would be attending yet. Right after finishing the Job Fair poster, so we created our letter for reaching out to companies. The companies could choose from 3 levels of sponsorship, Platinum, Gold and Silver, each with different perks and advantages, the Silver sponsorship package was available if a company decided to sponsor the Job Fair for 500 Bulgarian Lev, which roughly translates to 250 Euro. The Gold sponsorship package included everything from the Silver sponsorship package while also featuring extra advantages, and was available from 750 Bulgarian Lev. Finally the Platinum sponsorship package included everything from the Gold and Silver packages while featuring even more advantages, this package was available for 1500 Bulgarian Lev and these sponsors were the Job Fairs biggest partners. Here is the BuildYourBrand Letter we created as an invitation to the sponsors:

The problem with the BuildYourBrand Letter created for last years Job Fair was that it wasn’t available as a text file anymore, Martin only had it as an Adobe Illustrator file with all the letters rasterized, which means they were all seperate objects instead of being in textboxes. This meant I had to do all the typing, layering and mapping of the text boxes, title boxes, logos and other elements from the start. Luckily Martin taught me how to use the Rulers and Guides, and the Line-Out actions in Illustrator and Photoshop which helped with keeping everything nicely lined out and straight, however it did take some time to get it all right and understood.

A few days later we received confirmations from most companies about the type of sponsorship package they wanted etc. so we added their logos to the poster and hung it up around campus:

After dropping the flower and newspaper ideas at the end of the last week, the Creative Team and I decided to go with the Old Gold, line effect and to add a grain over it to give it a printed vintage look. I spent the rest of the week and a big part of the next week on pumping out all the 30 pictures I had to edit.

The main difficulty with the pictures was that not everyone’s picture was taken on the same day, so the lighting in the studio was slightly different between shoots, which added some challenge to making the shadows on everyone look equal and the highlight in their face not too bright. The line work was done with my Wacom drawing tablet in Photoshop.

Another difficult thing about the pictures was making the linework consistently good across the pictures while also trying to make it fitting for everyones separate picture, especially on the hair as there were a lot of different types of hair which obviously meant that there should be different types of lines as well. I created and deleted a ton of lines according to the producers vision of the pictures, and together we managed to create a connected series of vintage looking pictures.

After the linework I added the slight grain and the logos to finish off the pictures.

The rest of the second week I worked on a poster for the AUBG Job Fair, this is an event where companies setup a stand on campus and students can send in their resume to setup possible connections with the companies. The first poster was to incentivize students to send in their resume, this is why my Internship Coach wanted to make the poster look like an actual resume, this was last years Resume Book poster:

With this as a sort of template, I started working to make it look more obviously like a one-page resume, this is the first layout I worked out.

I impressed Martin with the idea of the foldertab look of the Logo and Contact bars at the bottom, and with the clean layout of the skills tab. With these layout choices set, and the changes in mind that Martin mentioned, I continued working on the poster and after some more changes and talks about certain aspects of the poster, we ended up with this as the final version for the Resume Book poster:

This was a very busy week as the Creative Team told me that we were already late with the profile pictures so they wanted me to show progress as much as possible during the week. I talked and worked with my Internship Coach Martin to figure out the best way to do the line designs as he had experience in this, the first draft I did was:

My coach and the creative team were very satisfied with these accentuating lines and the next step was to experiment with different hues for the pictures, I tried several different purple/pinkish hues and effects:

And several different yellow hues:

But no one really liked how these turned out, so we dropped the different hues idea quick. Instead I started looking for different Photoshop Editing Presets that we could try to combine into a unique effect, here are some of those tryouts:

After more experimentation, combining of effects and discussing about good looking effects and bad looking effects, I created a combination of effects, namely the ‘Old Gold’ Preset and the ‘Washed Matte’ Preset, into this:

This combination of effects is the base for the rest of our edits, however we felt like we didn’t hit the right notes yet so we continued experimenting with other things as well, like the flower and torn newspaper effect:

I made some compositions with the flowers surrounding the cast members, however the Creative Team wasn’t really a fan of it.

Here I tried more flowers and to keep them a little smaller, I also got back to the idea of giving every department different colors.

This was the first version of the newspaper idea, basically the cast members photo would be covering an important news article about the war in Vietnam.

This was the second version of the newspaper, as you can see its a lot smaller and the message isn’t as visible, but it looks better. However the Creative Team also wasn’t a fan of this so we dropped the idea.

Since the creative team had to discuss new ideas for the profile pictures of the Musical Cast, I was tasked with designing an interesting visual table to present the Sponsorship Benefits to our potential sponsors. The first basic draft I did was:

After working out more details over the course of the week and gradually making final decisions, we settled on a less strict design that incorporated more the creative freedom side that fit our project, ending up with:

Sponsors receive the different Sponsorship Benefits according to their contribution to the project, resulting in a fair exchange from both parties.

At the end of the week, the creative team decided what type of profile pictures they would like, and they gave me several images as a base of our designs.

They settled on a line and flower effect, which I started working on for the next week.

Over the next week we experimented with the sunrays effect more and tried out having the background effect be different colors for the different departments of the Musical Club, purple for the Dancers, yellow for the Actors, red for the Backvocals and green for the Organizers.

We had several meetings and discussions about how to make this look better however in the end we decided not to use this effect as it looked a bit too much like a comic book, and it was difficult to do succesful and clean cutouts on the pictures of the girls from the cast as most of them were doing a hairflip, with the hair being blurry because of the motion. I asked for help from the designer for the musical from last year and from my internship coach but this effect sadly just wasn’t doable in a succesful way with the quality of the pictures we had, even though it did look very good on some occasions.

The second week I continued with my work on the profile pictures for the Musical Clubs cast, the cast consists of 35 people including me and each of them needed a profile picture to promote our musical, which was my main responsibility as designer for the Broadway Performance Club. Nikoleta Mancheva, the producer of the musical, and I worked this week on a ray/sunshine effect that we were thinking about using.

For this effect I created the sunrays in Illustrator and put it together with the picture in Adobe Photoshop, I received help from my internship coach to create cleaner and nicer looking cutouts of difficult things like hair and cloth. Here is the original picture:

The sunshine effect fits the ‘HAIR’ theme because the musicals most famous song is ‘Let The Sunshine In’, this together with the Grain effect on Boyan himself gave it a nice vintage vibe that worked well with the rest of the project in my opinion.

My Internship at the Marketing Department of the American University in Bulgaria officially began at the 22nd of Januari. My Internship coach Martin and I started off with several meetings about the types of work he had in mind for me, the quality of the work he expected and other important things such as the rough schedule he had made of the upcoming events and what these events were, the look and feel associated with them and how they were marketed past school years.

We also talked about my experience in photography as about 2 years back he hired a photographer to shoot professional pictures of student life on campus however the pictures turned out very staged, so he wants me to make more genuine pictures later in the semester when the sun shows up.

Next to the meetings, Martin also showed me some of the other people I would be working with and the places that might be of importance (where the printers are, where I should get the posters signed for approval to hang them around campus, the coffee machine etc.)