Peculiar Faces

Peculiar Faces transformed a traditional academic showcase into an engaging brand experience that celebrated individual creative personalities while maintaining cohesive visual storytelling across all touchpoints. This comprehensive campaign included hand-illustrated character portraits for each graduate, a fully responsive website with interactive profiles, custom social media templates, and large-format environmental graphics that turned gallery spaces into immersive brand experiences.

Project Goals:

Highlight the Grads

Create a unified visual identity that celebrates each graduating designer's unique creative personality while establishing collective cohesion for the graduate exhibition experience.

Showcase Enhancement

Elevate graduate portfolios through premium brand experience that demonstrates sophisticated design thinking & professional presentation capabilities to potential employers.

Academic Recognition

Position the design program as innovative and student-centered, showcasing educational excellence through creative campaign execution that attracts future students and industry attention.

Industry Networking

Create networking opportunities and industry visibility for graduates through compelling brand storytelling that connects emerging designers with established professionals.

Target Audiences:

Industry Professionals

Creative directors, design agencies, and potential employers seeking fresh talent with demonstrated branding and campaign development skills. They need to quickly assess graduate capabilities through professional presentation and innovative thinking showcased in the exhibition experience.

Graphic Design Students

Undergraduate design students and high school prospects considering design education who want to see program outcomes and student success.

They're motivated by seeing authentic student work and understanding the creative community they could join.

Community & Faculty

Design educators, program administrators, and academic peers interested in innovative student engagement and exhibition strategies. They value creative approaches to graduate showcases that enhance educational experience and program reputation.

Friends & Family

Personal support networks and community members attending the graduate exhibition who may not have design background but want to understand and celebrate the graduates' achievements. They need accessible, engaging presentation that translates creative work into relatable experiences.

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Invitation Box

Custom-designed invitation boxes served as tangible marketing pieces and memorable keepsakes that extended the Peculiar Faces experience beyond digital touch points.

Each box contained curated event collateral including branded snacks reflecting the quirky campaign personality, collectible character stickers featuring each graduate's illustrated portrait, a unique printed sweater exclusive to invitation recipients, and premium event materials like exhibition guides and networking cards.

These invitation boxes transformed standard event promotion into experiential marketing that reinforced the "peculiar" brand promise while demonstrating the design program's attention to comprehensive brand experiences and execution quality.

Event Posters

Hand-drawn sketched pastels and mixed medium paintings were vectorized and transformed into promotional art posters that bridged traditional artistic techniques with modern design applications.

Each poster maintained the organic, authentic feel of the original hand-sketched artwork while gaining the scalability and reproduction quality needed for comprehensive event promotion across multiple formats and sizes.

Event Gallery Website

A curated digital gallery showcasing featured design works from each graduate with integrated contact points that functioned as both portfolio presentation and networking platform. The website featured individual graduate profiles with their signature character illustrations, project galleries highlighting their best work, and direct contact information enabling industry professionals and visitors to connect with emerging designers.

Event Collateral

A comprehensive collection of branded event merchandise including custom bracelets featuring the campaign's signature colors and typography, event tags that doubled as networking tools with graduate contact information, exclusive crewneck sweatshirts with hand-illustrated character designs, and collectible buttons showcasing each graduate's unique portrait illustration.

Peculiar Faces Branding

I created brand identities that deliberately challenged conventional design thinking, specializing in edgy, abstract visual languages that were completely and utterly confusing yet irresistibly fun and expressive. My approach to branding embraced creative chaos, developing identity systems that puzzled audiences while drawing them deeper into the brand experience through bold, unconventional choices.

Email Campaign

I developed a multi-week email countdown campaign that built anticipation through increasingly abstract and confusing yet irresistibly engaging sneak peeks into the graduate exhibition. Each email offered mysterious glimpses "through windows" of the design process, featuring fragmented character illustrations, cryptic typography experiments, and deliberately puzzling visual teasers that left recipients both bewildered and excited for more.

Kurtis Shayne Studio