Emily
Lennea
I am a graphic designer and a mountain girl born and raised in British Columbia. I find inspiration from the world around me and from the various subjects I learn about. I am passionate about using research-based design to create solutions to real-world problems and educating people about what design is and why it matters. My goal is to find ways of using design to benefit society, and I’ve already started to accomplish this by working for non-profits and teaching design workshops. Over the pandemic, I found routines that increase my productivity and make time for building new habits, like working out and reading more.
SHAPE:19 Graphic Design Conference Identity Package
The world is made up of geometric and organic forms. Designers harness these shapes and utilize different principles to shape the surrounding world from systems and communications to mindsets and lifestyles. The conference takes place in Melbourne, Australia in 2019. The brand connects to the easy-going yet lively and diverse nature of Australia and utilizes Melbourne’s reputation for sustainability to promote sustainability goals within design fields.
he logo has a fun, colourful character that relates to the conference personality. Figure ground integrates the literal shape, colon and “E” into one element. The main conference colours are used in the parent logo to bring a playful aspect that can be incorporated or adapted for different materials and contexts.
The conference booklet shows another application of the brand and style guidelines throughout various layouts, which include a table of contents and letter from the directors, speaker bios, schedule, workshop details, location map, nearby attractions and eateries, and a sponsor list.
The website landing page features an eye-catching hero image and call to action. It references the conference theme in connection to graphic designers creating change. Down the page shows the conference mission and objectives, highlights conference workshops and speakers, and allows visitors to find nearby accommodations, attractions, and restaurants.
O.K. Coral Educational Video Game Design
The O.K. Coral is an underwater, Western-themed educational game that balances fun and learning for biology students to understand the different environmental resources and conditions required for coral to reproduce and survive. It is a single or multi-player game-of-life style game where players choose a coral gamete character to upgrade into a coral and settle by purchasing resources, collecting points, and through chance scenarios while avoiding disasters and strengthening relationships with allies.
Cha Tea Branding & Product Design
Cha Tea makes ready-made sparkling tea beverages with the potential to expand into other tea products. The brand personality respects and pays homage to the long history of tea, but adds a bold, modern, unconventional twist that incorporates elegance and fun. Sparkling tea puts a modern twist on a traditional tea beverage.
The Cha Tea logo incorporates a ship, a leaf, and a water drop connecting to historic and global tea trading, tea leaves and the water in which it is steeped. Historically gold has been the colour of quality and excellence for centuries. It steers away from traditional tea colour palettes, which often involve green and earthy colours.
The stationary package incorporates the brand colours and graphic elements of the logo to create unity within variation.
The Island of Dr. Moreau Book Publication
H.G. Well’s thrilling story describes an outcast scientist’s experiments to turn animals human and govern them with five humanizing laws. When the puma woman breaks free and destroys the compound and Moreau, the narrator watches the animals slowly return to their natural forms, posing the question, “what makes us human?”
This publication captures the horror genre and main elements of the story for a subtly unnerving look and feel.
This publication captures the horror genre and main elements of the story for a subtly unnerving look and feel.
The puma woman, who is a primary catalyst, is featured on the cover with subtly human features to communicate the literal transformations and metaphoric implications detailed in the book. The dust jacket features the five laws the animals believe distinguish them as human, as they are central to the story and Well’s philosophical speculations.
The inside pages continue the dystopian look and feel while presenting readers with a layout that enhances speeding through the chilling story.
A Form of UX: Improving Civil Service Forms
I studied user-centered form design to improve municipal forms. Research shows that there is no consistent format, pattern library, or application of brand for PDF forms in most of the departments, and existing forms are problematic. Most form creators lack the time, resources, and knowledge to create well-designed forms. A design toolkit that educates and demonstrates how to create a uniform, consistent, well-designed forms can be used to help government employees improve their forms and citizen experiences.
In the 2020 fall semester, I conducted a literary review, a heuristic analysis, expert interviews, and user testing to identify strengths and weaknesses within municipal service forms. Results showed that the largest percent of issues is with language, form flow, and formatting, and existing forms are inefficient, wasting employee resources and creating challenges for citizens. Based on research results, I make recommendations for a form design toolkit, which I then developed over the winter semester.
I created form design guidelines, translated them into a Google Doc form template for employees to build from, made a checklist to ensure due diligence, redesigned 2 PDF forms, and housed them all on a microsite prototype designed to educate employees to the need and benefits of good form design. These tools are intended to save government employees time and help citizens gain access to the services they need.
The form template and checklist were created in Google Docs to be easily accessible to all employees. The template is a starting point for employees to produce forms for publication or for a designer to complete the design in InDesign. The checklist helps ensure employees have followed the guidelines correctly to enforce efficiency and unity.
Adobe InDesign is ideal for form creation, but very few government employees have access or knowledge of the program. Forms were redesigned in both InDesign and Google Docs to show a comparison of both programs, as well as overall improvements to the redesigns.
