When the Laguna College of Art & Design launched the Creative Mosaic Scholarship Fund to support students, the campaign kicked off with visuals that ultimately the client wasn’t happy with. Understandably, a revision was on the table.
We knew the solution would be a mosaic, but what type of mosaic? How should it fit the LCAD culture? And how can it be used in the future, not just this campaign for the upcoming semester? I led the way by going back to the opening paragraph of the copy:
In this mosaic of students, each contributes to the alchemy of turning discovery and learning into skill and mastery — because the creative process is richer when a broad spectrum of experiences and viewpoints collide.
The mosaic had to be: dynamic, unique, ever-changing (if not ever-growing), yet also consistent and coherent (if not adherent).
In other words, it had to be a system. Exciting!
For a system to be usable and understandable to all, including to future users, it fundamentally needs to have steps, like in an assembly line. Only this assembly line is going to create something unique and unexpected every time. The steps to assemble LCAD’s mosaic are:
Modular units → arrangment → color → style → application
Before I worked out what these steps would comprise of, I had to nail down the visual language. I created six moodboards, which were shared and discussed at length with the client, so the look and feel was very clear.
From there, I started creating the first modular units. They are unified by a simple grid and their shapes are informed by LCAD’s architecture and the Laguna Beach environs. Pretty quickly, I realized that the 1×1 units would look really boring, so I designed a series of 1×2 modular units also.
Next, in their arrangement, I proposed that the system can allow for all 1×1 layouts, all 1×2 layouts, or a mix of the two. A mix feels the closest to the school’s vision, but making simpler arrangements possible is also important in a robust system to cover as many usage scenarios as possible. To that end, I also proposed that the mixed-units application can have the added complexity of mixing scale.
As for the colors, I pulled from the brand palette so that units are either cool-colored or warm-colored. This offered the best visual results, looking stronger than if all units were a mix of all colors, regardless of temperature.
Style, for the current campaign, is a bit of an outlier. The “default” style is a flat color application, but in the future, the colors could be painterly or the sections could be rendered in 3D.
Finally, for the application, I re-designed the scholarship’s printed matter. The brand team I worked with also proposed applying the mosaic system to the school newsletter’s Group Stories, a showcase of current students’ background — how they got to LCAD, their experiences studying here, and their creative collaborations. The students’ photos could be revealed behind the mosaic.
Creative & art direction: Intersection Studio
Design lead: Dana Chen
Additional design: Jeanie Chong
