I AM CREATIVE
My freshman year of college, I participated in a creative organization called MUCCI, or Miami University Community for Creativity and Innovation. MUCCI’s mission was to plan and host a big celebration at the end of April, called World Creativity and Innovation Week. World Creativity and Innovation Week spans from April 15th to April 20th, or in other words, from DaVinci’s birthday to (roughly) Earth Day. My role in planning for this celebration was to create a doodle wall. This wall would be 4 feet tall by 8 feet wide and made of a white-tinted piece of glass sitting inside a wooden frame. The design would be printed in black outlines, with the intention of being colored in with Sharpies.
This project is easier to understand while looking at the final result, so I’m starting with images of the final design. I created this entirely in Adobe Illustrator! My artboard was 4ft by 8ft, the same size as the glass it would later be printed on. The words “I am creative“, the tagline of World Creativity and Innovation Week, run across the center. Between the words “am” and “creative” sits a vectorized replication of Pulley Tower, the bell tower on Miami University’s campus. I filled the remaining space by intricately positioning a variety of icons, weaving the elements together like a puzzle.
The first thing I did was create the icons. All of my original icons are pictured here. As you can see, some of them made it to the final version, some had to be altered, and others were removed completely. Each icon symbolizes Miami, Oxford, MUCCI, or creativity.
After submitting my first design, all of the icons were reviewed. MUCCI didn’t like the paint brushes, so those got removed. Anything with a Miami M on it had to be approved by Miami for copyright reasons. The football field and hockey court were denied, and I was told I could use the seal, but had to remove the outer ring.
The next step was creating the bell tower. I actually found a TikTok of someone drawing the bell tower, screenshotted it, brought it into Illustrator, and used the pen tool to outline each of the different shapes. This worked really well!
I positioned the bell tower on my artboard, added the tagline “I am creative” around it, and began to add in the icons all around it. Adding the icons took FOREVER. I couldn’t create a pattern as I needed the shapes to flow nicely with the bell tower and tagline, so I placed, angled, and sized each and every object individually! The process took over five hours, which I did in one sitting… and then I had to do it all over again two days later when the icons changed…
This project taught me to take risks! I was one of eight people on the design team in MUCCI. Each of us was assigned a different project for World Creativity and Innovation Week. This doodle wall was actually not my original assignment, despite me requesting it numerous times. I was instead assigned to create a poster for an A-frame sign. A poster sounded significantly less cool than a doodle wall, so I decided to go home, design the entire wall in one night, and then show up the next morning with printed out copies of my designs as a proposal. This was a pretty big risk… I pulled an all-nighter to get a draft done, and I knew the organization had every right to say no. Thankfully, it worked! The organization’s leadership team allowed my project to be reassigned.