The Great Lakes Children’s Museum was turning 25, and the birthday needed to carry more than a celebration.
The anniversary became the anchor for a full campaign: a week of events in August 2025, community outreach, fundraising, and expanded programming. The museum needed one visual identity flexible enough to feel playful for families, credible for donors, and consistent across print, social, email, and web materials.
In Visual Communications Studio, our four-person team worked with the museum as a real client. I served as the primary client contact, led the discovery process, wrote the proposal and contract, built the project brief and timeline, and kept the team moving from shared direction instead of separate instincts.
Four designers working toward one identity is a systems problem before it is a design problem.
Each designer developed a separate moodboard, then I compiled all four into one presentation. Instead of asking the client what they liked, we asked them to respond to specific visual directions: color, type, illustration style, pattern, and tone.
That changed the quality of the feedback. It gave us decisions, not vague preferences. From there, I built a design cheat sheet the whole team could use, so our individual pieces would still feel like one campaign. My logo concept was selected as the base direction. The client also liked specific elements from Amanda’s concept, so I revised the mark to bring those pieces into the final system. That collaboration made the identity stronger without losing the original direction.
I was responsible for both client-facing structure and a key part of the design system the team worked from.
- Client contact and project management
- Proposal, contract, brief, checklist, and timeline
- Discovery meeting facilitation
- Moodboard compilation and presentation
- Design cheat sheet for team alignment
- Logo design selected by the client
- Social media assets and email tag
Other deliverables, including rack cards, brochures, and web banners, were developed by teammates using the shared system.
The selected identity moved directly into campaign use and gave the team a system they could keep building from.
The logo was selected from my directions, and the client described the collaboration as giving them far more than they expected.
Everything was delivered on timeline for the August 2025 campaign. The system made it possible for multiple designers to produce consistent work without constant revision loops.
The identity did not just launch the campaign. It gave the team something they could continue building from.
"The 25th birthday logo struck the perfect balance between playful and professional. This collaboration has given us far more than we anticipated: tools we will continue to use well beyond this year."
Tracie MacPherson, Executive Director · Great Lakes Children's Museum
These are screenshots of actual posts the museum published on Instagram. The designs went directly from delivery into use.