University Communications
& Marketing
Long Story Short…
During my time at Miami, I consulted on client design requests to uphold Miami University’s brand guidelines and ensure unified branding across departments.
I also multitasked with team members to collaborate on a variety of projects in a fast-paced environment.
2025 Main & Divisional Commencement Covers
I was incredibly fortunate to work on a project that would be seen by ~4,000 of my fellow graduating peers. To arrive at my final design, I iterated through many different templates and presented design concepts to the university partners. Some of the design concepts went into multiple rounds of revisions.
Final Design
The final chosen design was inspired by the variety of flowers on Miami’s campus in time for the spring season. I created Photoshop and InDesign template files for the main commencement cover so that designing the divisional commencement covers would take less time and effort.
Swoop Illustrations
Miami’s mascot, Swoop, is a strong symbol for one of our most frequent clients: the sports department. After a golfing pose for Swoop was requested by the golf team, all the other Miami sports were clamoring for their versions of Swoop. I answered their calls by iterating on swoop concepts, scanning finalized sketches, vectorizing them in Illustrator, and promptly making adjustments based on client feedback.
Click through the slideshow below to see my process.
Small poses are quickly sketched to capture the gesture of Swoop. Poses are shown to client who choose the most accurately depicted version.
Two final sketches are drawn out in further detail and scanned.
One version is chosen, vectorized, and colored.
All Together
In total, I helped digitize and finalize 9 Swoop illustrations over the course of 3 weeks. All the clients were happy to get their personalized versions of Swoop, and I enjoyed the stickers, scarves, and other deliverables designed with my hard work.
Icon Creation
Icons are a small yet important part of Miami’s branding. They are the visual flair that makes Miami’s website pages and handouts come together. Over my time at the communications department, I created 22 unique icons in Illustrator based on client specifications. To the left is the process work of three AI-related icons.
Art Museum Rebranding
The Richard and Carlole Cocks Art Museum (RCCAM) requested 16 Miami University-style icons. I converted complex, 3-dimensional sculptures into abstract yet identifiable icons. With these new icons, the art museum now uses these designed markers for its sculptures, events, and marketing material.
During this process of icon creation, I was additionally given a mundane task: to rename every icon file in the university’s arsenal, which numbered over 30,000 files.
I created a JavaScript file that ran in Illustrator and could export 100 icons in 3 minutes. Months of work could be done in 20 minutes, and I saved Miami University about $20,000 per year. Along with the script, I created an instruction manual for future users to traverse its dialog boxes.
Canva Social Media Templates
We noticed that many people in the sports department were not posting social media content in line with Miami’s brand standards, but it would have been silly to have each post go through as a client request. As a workaround, I designed 30+ templates in Canva for quick drag-and-drop images and replacing text. This was an effort to make the posting process for non-designers more streamlined and intuitive. Below are some examples of sports posts.
