Kent State University enrolls roughly 5-6K new freshmen each fall semester. Students come to campus with a variety of technical backgrounds and minimal knowledge of the technology services available to them on the eight Kent State campuses. 

A sister department created a technology guidebook to help incoming freshmen acclimate to the technology used at Kent State, however, the person who had originally created the book left the department. I inherited the publication and opted to give it a complete restructure and redesign.

Improvements included:

• I reorganized content from an audience grouping–which had resulted in considerable overlap of content–to grouping by service type: connecting to various systems, technology on campus, and tech support.

• I changed the formatting from a horizontal layout to a standard 6” x 9” vertical. 

• I edited copy to be clear and concise, created smaller blocks of text that spanned shorter widths, and used bullets and other organizational tools to make the content more easily consumable.

MY ROLE
I was responsible for the majority of the effort on this publication: performed research and conducted interviews with staff, wrote copy, and executed the design. For the later issues, I collaborated with my direct reports and acted as art director for a junior designer. Prior to leaving the university, I consolidated all of the information in the book onto a website.

I was charged with communicating important IT-related information to the university community, and to inform them about the happenings within the IT division. One method used was an eight page division newsletter titled InSights. Inside spreads are shown here.

An area of great concern is always cyber security. I worked with Kent State’s Office of Security and Access Management to produce a series of Cyber Security newsletters. Shown here is the last edition prior to moving to a completely online version.

I was responsible for the majority of the effort for both of these publications. I performed research and conducted interviews with staff, wrote and co-wrote articles, and designed both pieces.

Side note: I also wore the Flash costume for the photo on the front inside spread.

TechHelp, Kent State University’s student tech support service, needed a logo to represent the coming together of several separate tech support entities under a single brand. 

The criteria was that the emphasis should be placed on “help” and that it needed to be recognized as a Kent State service, so students would not think it was offered by a third party. 

We were later used as a study for a Public Relations course assignment. The student group surveyed 100 Kent State students. 100% of students surveyed recognized the TechHelp brand.