Food & beverages, decor, activities, facilities, marketing, staffing, budgeting, purchasing, prizes, setup & tear-down — what isn’t involved in planning a fundraiser event? Executing an amazing event does not happen overnight, and I was privileged to not only be the designer for this organization’s event but also participate on the planning committee!
Comprehensive and consistent event design
While I ultimately designed all materials for the event, I initially only “signed up” to create the flyer. When I started designing the rest of the event materials, I infused the styles and branding I had developed in the flyer into each following piece.
The organization’s hand-drawn logo was a fun base point for building a design and subsequent theme. It is a digital version of a hand-drawn design, and I wanted to keep with that hand-drawn theme. I selected fonts that looked hand-drawn and created patterns in the blue from the logo.
Consistent branding throughout this event looked like:
- Event logo on all materials
- Specific blue
- Specific hand-drawn fonts
- Consistent use of custom patterns
The event required such pieces to be designed:
- Flyer
- Slideshow
- Table signage
- Forms
- Quiz worksheets
- Rule sheets
- Quizmaster documents
- Mulligan labels
Eye-catching patterns in flyer design
The flyer to promote the event was the first item I needed to design. We needed a PDF version to be emailed to local organizations to print and hang for their constituents and a digital version to be posted on social media and embedded into email newsletters.
I incorporated custom patterns into the background and used them to create a content hierarchy. Since there were a lot of short bits of content to present, I selected a fun, and what I thought was on-theme, glyph to use as a dingbat.
I created a printable version of the flyer that was 2-up on an 11″x8.5″ document and a jpg version that was 1560x2400px.
Engaging blue & white in slideshow design
Once the organization began distributing the flyer, I set to work on the slideshow for the event. I brought the colors and fonts from the flyer into the designs and ultimately based the entire event’s theme on them. The venue had PowerPoint capabilities, so I created a few slide templates I later built into a complete PowerPoint slideshow.
I created slide templates in Photoshop and stylesheets in PowerPoint in both blue and white designs:
- Event theme slides with logo
- Game round slides with an icon to represent the round
- Round intro slides with round title and description
- Round question slides with running header and question
Once the committee finalized the questions for the trivia, I built the slideshow. Each round had one intro slide and 10 question slides, followed by an event theme slide for event branding during breaks.
Elevating direction in signage design
For the night of the event, we needed signage at the concession table, registration table, judges table, team tables, and auction tables. We determined the best signage would be a mixture of foldable tent signs to place on top of the tables and sheet signs to hang on the front of the tables facing guests.
Keeping with the blues and hand-drawn theme, I used the patterns I previously created to amplify the signage.
