LISSA bulletin board: before + after

I am a board member of LISSA, our student chapter of the American Library Association at my school. This semester I volunteered to take point on revising our group bulletin board. The previous bulletin board was fine, by the way. it looked like this:

The most important thing to change was the list of Board Members and officers along the bottom. I could have just done that and it would have been enough. The emphasis on this display was on how to get in touch with us online, how to find out information via our blog, our Facebook, our Twitter or via email. The center of the board was usually kept empty for hanging event flyers of upcoming events.

Stylistically, this board went along with the other 2 bulletin boards on that wall, which graduate students look at regularly. Right next to our bulletin board is a board for posting job opening and internships. Students look there frequently. On the other side is a board where faculty articles and publications are posted. This board is also the main passage between the graduate school office and the neighboring building. So students do walk past here. But since the LISSA board stylistically matched the other 2 boards, no one really noticed it any more.

Here's how I changed it. Now it looks different from the other boards and gives a pop of color in the hall. I worked with another Board member to come up with ideas for what to include and how to arrange it, but the design was mine.

For me, the big thing is that students don't know what LISSA is or all that we do. In a class last semester, 4 groups had to present on strengths and weaknesses of our grad program. Every group but mine included criticisms of LISSA in their presentation, mostly about not knowing what LISSA is or does except for monthly pizza parties and weekly bar nights we host as social events. However, we also plan and offer educational events like behind the scenes tours of interesting area libraries (this summer it is the Chicago Botanic Garden Research Library), career days, mentoring opportunities, workshops on how to fulfill the grad school's technology competency requirements, book clubs for Graphic Novels and YA Lit, and various other one shot events like my National Library Week Speaker from April, and now we are doing New Student Workshops in the first 2 weeks of classes to tell new grad students about things at school that we all wish we'd known when we started.

Basically, we do a lot, we offer a lot. Being on the Board itself offers professional development and leadership opportunities, and any grad student is welcome to join. We spend a lot of effort trying to get students to look at our online accounts to find out what is going on. The grad school sends out global emails to the student body notifying them of events and opportunities.

So most important to me was to have a place where all the things we do, at least for the semester, are laid out, so everything is there all in one spot. I worked with another board member to come up with the the WHO, WHAT WHEN, HOW approach and what should go where, and we sketched out some ideas.

I then measured the board itself and created a document that size in InDesign. There I was able to work with spacing, create custom colors, and choose fonts. My initial colors were celery green (spring), royal blue (crisp for summer) and a sort of orangey red (fall). I then worked out how many pieces of paper in each color I'd need, and I created a PDF file of all the text elements that could be printed out.

The fun part was going to Archivers and shopping for paper, of course! Unfortunately they did not have the orangey-red color I wanted, not even close. I ended up with a red with a slight orange tint to it. I also decided to use some patterned paper to give the design some depth, since cardstock only looks flat to me, and I can't really Tim Holtz this sucker up.

So now the board includes names of the LISSA Board members and photos (added afterwards), a complete calendar of events all at once, space for the latest event flyers, and a section for all the ways to contact us.

I have really missed having fun with paper and fonts! Creating something like this gives me a big rush. The physical construction was surprisingly rigorous, involving getting up and down on a little table (no step stool), holding stuff over my head a lot, placing things temporarily and then moving them around a lot. Even with my sketches and measurements, I still needed to tweak it in person.

I've gotten a lot of compliments on it, and I've seen students stopping to look at it, so I call this a success!

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Photo 1: DU LISSA bulletin board, before. Dominican University, Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences. River Forest, IL. Taken by me. May 2010.

Photo 2: DU LISSA bulletin board, after. Dominican University GSLIS. River Forest, IL. Taken by me. May 2010.

Photo 3: GSLIS bulletin boards. Lewis Link, Dominican University GSLIS. River Forest, IL. Taken by me. May 2010.