The Ph.D. Program in CCI wanted something to mail to other schools to advertise to other students. CCI has a bulletin board covered with posters from other schools advertising different programs, so I took a look there to see what other schools were doing. Most of them are badly designed with too much information and clutter. I noticed a couple had a “take-one” pad varying in sizes, which I thought was a good idea.

"take-one" pad

We would be mailing the Ph.D. brochure with the poster, so I knew they had to match. I wanted the “take-one” card to work like a business card; so I made it the smallest that the printer recommended, with the important information of the name, tag line, and website. That way students don’t have to write the information down, they can just take one, and hopefully they are more likely to visit the website.

Once the materials were ready, I worked on finding the top 250 national computer science universities and the top 200 international universities. I used USNews.com’s list of American’s Best Colleges 2008, and then had to go to each school’s website individually to find the department/school name and address. Talk about a long grueling process, but I got it done in a few days!

With very limited budget and supplies, and having to put 100 invitations and programs together by-hand, I was able to come up with a creative solution. I had to figure out how to visualize cybercrime, the main topic of the conference. I created a mini police crime folder with Staples’ ivory cover stock, and plain copy paper for the mini pieces of paper inside. I stapled the “News Media Release” over the longer sheet of conference speaker bios in the invitation, and the same for the program’s schedule and speaker bios. In the invitation I left the hand-drawn map (with directions on the backside) loose so you could take it with you.

Invitation with map

program

I chose the fonts Handwritten-Dakota and American Typewriter to make it look like an authentic police letter, I even added a case number from the date. If you notice the “Victims” are IP addresses to relate it to cybercrime.