Size Matters
Dug this one out of the archives a little while back. It was one of my favorite projects at the time because my own personal story birthed the concept.
Winthrop University has a great visual arts program, but it often gets overlooked when depicted in other University materials which try to reach a much broader audience. Potential students of the visual arts are a different breed though. So when I began to develop this viewbook for the art and design department, I tapped into what made me choose Winthrop – it’s small size.
As for my own history with Winthrop, I went there for my first semester and left because I still wasn’t sure where my life was going. But after a brief stint at a tech school, which felt more like high school than college, and another huge state university where I was lost in enormous classes and a student body in the tens of thousands, I came back to Winthrop. I knew that to get an advantage in graphic design, I needed a more personal education where I knew my professor by first name and could count my classmates on two hands and maybe one foot.
By taking the tongue-in-cheek phrase of “Size Matters” and turning it on its head, I was able to depict how the small class sizes at Winthrop provide a better learning atmosphere and the opportunity to stand out as an individual artist. It would have been easy to get sexually graphic with the title, but that would be too obvious and not set the tone we were looking for. We chose to be subtle in the communication by making headlines small and highlighting individual students rather than groups. Minimized text pages are juxtaposed with full pages of students’ work and their names. This effect helped create some small amount of fame for these artists, and hopefully prospective students would see this and desire the same.