Life is Ruff: Promoting Animal Rescues
I created a complete event package with promotional materials for design practice. When I started this task, I wasn’t sure what type of event I wanted to use. So I scrolled through endless lists of local events and non-local events. Halloween is my favorite holiday, so I thought I might find an interesting Halloween festival. Thus, I got distracted by Halloween festivities in Salem, MA (and all of their tickets are sold out if you’re curious).
Nonetheless, I didn’t find a festival or event that piqued my interest as a designer. Then, I decided I wanted to use a charity event. Best case scenario: I can donate my promotional designs for their event. Worst case scenario: I don’t. I stumbled upon the “Brews for Rescues” fundraiser for the Animal Rescue Foundation of Tulsa. Being the type of person who squeals “PUPPY!” every time I pass a dog, I couldn’t pass up the chance to promote a local animal rescue.
I scribbled the event information I needed into my notebook:
The event: Brews for Rescues fundraiser
Company: Animal Rescue Foundation
Date and time: Thursday, September 16 from 5:30 to 8:00 PM
The venue: Dead Armadillo Brewery at 1004 E 4th St. Tulsa, OK
Why would people go: tickets include a souvenir Dead Armadillo glass, two pints of craft beer, tacos and chips from T-town tacos, live music by Gear Dogz, silent auction, and split the pot raffle.
Where do you get tickets: online at arftulsa.org/brews-for-rescues/
Additional info: $40 tickets, 21+ event only
With all of the details written out, I spent a minute thinking about themes: bones, beer, brews, ales, tails, paws, dogs/cats/pups, bark (in the park?), arf or woof, pints, and rescues. Next, I searched Google for some inspiration, including “non-profit fundraiser posters” and “animal rescue fundraiser event poster.” Some of these posters were not great design examples, but they influenced my imagery. Finally, I put my laptop away and sketched imagery for my chosen keywords to have some ideas for a larger design.
Time to put these ideas together! Knowing I would get distracted by sizing, I drew the outlines for four possible designs at 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches and marked the middle line and rule of thirds lines. For the first design, I featured a beer glass with the Animal Rescue Foundation logo. Working around the drawing, I added event information. The ticket information seemed dull as a list, so I spanned the list across the bottom and added dog bones to make it more fun.
Time to put these ideas together! Knowing I would get distracted by sizing, I drew the outlines for four possible designs at 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches and marked the middle line and rule of thirds lines. For the first design, I featured a beer glass with the Animal Rescue Foundation logo. Working around the drawing, I added event information. The ticket information seemed dull as a list, so I spanned the list across the bottom and added dog bones to make it more fun.
With the second sketch, I kept the beer glass but moved it closer to the upper left side of the page and fit the ticket information inside of one large bone. I thought a QR code would be convenient for someone to scan instead of typing in a URL and included it underneath the bone. In the end, I decided this design was too busy to use, but I kept the QR code idea.
Before moving on with my sketches, I looked on Unsplash to incorporate real photographs instead of illustrations. I found a picture with a dog licking a glass and an image of a person holding a dog’s paw.
Onto the third idea, a dog licking an empty beer glass could be cute (though I don’t condone giving animals alcohol). I featured this in my sketch and added the QR code under the recycled ticket details across the bottom. After adding the remaining event information, I moved onto the next design.
For the fourth (and final) design sketch, I emphasized the image of a person holding a dog’s paw by [name]. I filled in the event information around the image and developed the ticket information into a list using the bone graphic as a bullet point.
Back on my computer, I went to Canva to find relevant graphics and illustrations for these designs and found plenty (downloading SVG files with the pro subscription is truly a life-saver). Starting with Adobe Illustrator, I didn’t have a color scheme in mind but quickly decided on earthy tones. I added color to a graphic of a beer glass and overlayed the “ARF” logo onto the glass, but the logo was pixelated, so I recreated the logo with more SVG graphics from Canva.
I removed the background from the image of a person holding a dog’s paw. But with the dog licking an empty glass, how would that work? I could crop the image and remove the background, but that might look strange. So, I settled on illustrating this idea. Again, I went through graphics on Canva and found a boxer illustration and an empty glass. I combined these two ideas in Illustrator and edited the dog’s coloring to match my color palette. Now, the glass was floating in front of the dog and seemed strange. I drew out a hand holding up the glass and let the arm stretch off the artboard. They used a scripted font with some letters lightened on the ARF Tulsa website, so I searched Adobe Fonts for something similar. I did not find the exact font but used the “Goodlife” font by HVD Fonts. For event details, I used Kannada MN and Kannada Sangam MN fonts.
While designing flyers on Adobe InDesign, I considered turning each sketch into a flyer but ultimately chose to use only the first sketch as my flyer. The second sketch used too much imagery, the third sketch didn’t look great as a flyer, and the fourth sketch turned into a large poster.
In the first design, the centralized glass looked bland and scattered the event information around it, making the hierarchy nonexistent. So I moved the glass to the side and let the image bleed off the page. The format of the event information fell into place on the left, and I added in a paw-shaped QR code from Flowcode. After a few minutes of adjusting the text and graphics, I felt confident enough to start the following design: a poster.
For the poster, I loved the paw-holding image because it felt genuine. To get the photo to fit width-wise in the template, I had to make the picture bigger than I sketched out. I let the “Brews for Rescues” tuck behind the dog’s nose, and the remaining information fit under the person’s arm.
Every good promotional event needs a t-shirt. In this case, it required two shirt designs. I used my cute illustration of a dog licking an empty glass for the first design and added a simple “Brews for Rescues” text. For the second, I used the ARF glass design with a quirky “Drink Beer and Rescue Animals” text. Then, using PlaceIt, I created mockups for the t-shirt designs.
How do you make your previous attendees and donors feel appreciated if this is an annual event? VIP invitations, of course. I fit these on 5x7 card templates. Using the initial flyer design as a base for the cards, I edited the text and graphics to fit the new dimensions and added more personal flair. Unfortunately, the ticket banner at the bottom didn’t work in this size, so I recycled the bulleted list from the poster design.
The best way to promote an event is through social media: it’s free, simple, and reaches various people. I used three images (the person holding a dog’s paw, a t-shirt mockup, and the beer glass illustration) for example promotional posts on Instagram. First, I had to Google the ideal image sizes for Instagram posts, which happened to be 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels (equivalent to 15 x 15 inches in InDesign). Then, I took a screenshot from previous @arftulsa posts and erased the message and date to create a template for mockup posts. The first post included necessary information in the image since it would be the first and most informative post to cross someone’s social feed. The second image featured a t-shirt mockup, and the third image also had event details. Finally, the text contained all event information for each post.
On Facebook, I created an event banner and a thumbnail image. According to a Google search, the ideal banner size is 1920 by 1080 pixels, and thumbnails should be a minimum of 200 by 200 pixels or up to 1080 by 1080 pixels. I considered an animated banner, but additional animation seemed unnecessary since most events don’t use animated banners.
By this point, I used the beer glass illustrations on several designs and wanted to use the dog licking an empty glass illustration once more. However, with the drawing on the left, the information seemed crowded and poorly formatted on the right. So, I flipped the illustration around and let the event details line up on the left side of the page. Then, I reused the ticket information across the bottom of the page, using the dog’s chest as a “bookend.”
Since I used it so many times already, the beer glass illustration was the central image for the entire package. Using Artboard Studio, I made a mockup of a souvenir beer glass with the logo for the event thumbnail. However, using the illustration in multiple designs made the real-life mockup image look out of place against the other promotional materials. So, I switched the event thumbnail to the illustration but kept the mockup glass image for a potential souvenir glass design.
With a promotional package complete, I was ready for a brew (coffee, of course) surrounded by my rescues!