Design Showcase 2025
Official promotional poster for Design Showcase 2025, graphic design
Millikin University’s annual Design Showcase is a celebration of the best that the school’s art program has to offer. It’s a chance for accomplished artists nearing graduation to network with industry professionals and show off everything they’ve accomplished to their community. Normally restricted as a capstone project for senior art majors, I had the opportunity to serve on the board and participate in the showcase during my junior year. Throughout the semester, I workshopped plans for the event with my team, created original art installations for my table, and designed a promotional poster that would be printed and shared across campus.
My work on the poster required extensive planning. In addition to myself, I needed to satisfy seven other artists and my faculty advisor. Adding to the challenge, the event’s theme (titled “Cheers! Here’s To Us!” and acting as a literal and metaphorical toast to ourselves) was far from my first choice and left me feeling somewhat creatively frustrated. Still, I had a job to do, and I intended to do it well. I brainstormed and pitched several unique ideas that would encapsulate each artist’s identity and the theme of the event. As a team, we decided on a final design that I would draft shortly after. The poster depicted an illustrated champagne flute shattering into pieces. Each shard of glass would reflect an exemplary work from each artist’s portfolio, representing an energetic collision of styles that aligns with the event’s celebratory theme. My proof-of-concept draft used a collection of my own artwork that was later substituted with the art of my team members once I had received submissions from everyone. The one work of mine that I kept to represent me on the poster was a photo from my first self-portrait series. After a few iterations, the final poster was approved and updated with the appropriate information for the event. My design was printed and distributed across campus, shared on social media, and hung as a large-format banner at the Design Showcase event.
My display table at Design Showcase 2025, featuring prints of my work, digital displays, giveaways, and items for sale.
Alongside the official event poster, I completed many other significant works for Design Showcase 2025, most of which you can learn more about on my other webpages. This event was the debut of my multimedia art brand, Artistry Redefined, and that semester, I designed all the logos and branding assets that I use today. As a nod to the event’s theme of open bar celebration, I had the Artistry Redefined logo printed onto wooden coasters and designed a unique bottle with my branding on it. Labeled as “Heartshot Vodka,” it was a one-of-a-kind physical art piece haphazardly adorned with cynical text and imagery, and weathered through intense outdoor abuse. It’s incredibly eye-catching and uniquely me, and it’s still one of my favorite works I’ve done to date.
Both Artistry Redefined and my music brand, Benevolent Sin, got additional branding overhauls for this event, as I designed and printed unique posters for each of my properties. These were made to serve as a “designer resume”: items I could hand out for free for others to connect with and keep as a token of my unique work. You can learn more about my Artistry Redefined poster and my Benevolent Sin poster in these linked articles.
The event itself was a massive success. I worked hard to put together a table that would bring the unique flair of my artistic vision into the real world. I printed some of my favorite works, created cardboard cutouts of my brand assets, prepared looping slideshows and video presentations, sold CDs of my latest album, and, of course, gave out and signed plenty of posters. My table was something truly unique, and it was a perfect microcosm of everything that makes me special. It’s still one of my favorite events I’ve ever taken part in, and it made me more excited than ever to pursue bigger and better opportunities.
Design Showcase 2025: Branding Pitches
Various sketches of poster designs that I pitched to the Design Showcase team, illustration
