VCUarts Undergraduate Viewbook and Accepted Student Packages, 2024

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VCUarts Undergraduate Viewbook, 2024

My Role(s):
Design Direction
Stakeholder Collaboration + Strategy
Layout Design
Photo Direction + Selection
Research + Competitor Analysis

Awards:
Bronze Award, Publication Design
CASE Circle of Excellence, 2025
(4,400+ entries, 477 winners globally)

Regional Best, District III,
Publication Design
CASE Circle of Excellence, 2025

Excellence Award,
Publication Design/Viewbook
UCDA Design Awards, 2025

Judge comment (CASE):
"We loved this publication! It stands out visually, and the breakdown of the information was easy to read, as opposed to long paragraphs. Great work, VCUarts!"

The VCUarts Undergraduate Viewbook is the primary recruitment publication for VCU's School of the Arts. The previous viewbook had grown stale. It followed a rigid, repetitive template: one photo per department, the same information on every page, and a visual style that didn't reflect the creative energy of the school or its students. For a school that teaches design, the viewbook wasn't doing the work.

I was the lead graphic designer and helped with strategy and planning for the complete redesign for the fall 2024 recruitment cycle, from the initial stakeholder sessions with Admissions through to final layout, producing a publication that's playful, tactile, and competitive with peer institutions like RISD and SCAD. The viewbook became part of a broader admissions system that included an accepted student package and aligned with a concurrent website redesign.

The Challenge: The 2023 viewbook was functional but forgettable. Every department page looked the same: one hero photo, the same block of text, the same layout repeated fifteen times. It read more like a course catalog than a recruiting tool. For students choosing between VCUarts and schools that invest heavily in their admissions materials, it wasn't competitive.

The ask: completely overhaul the publication's design, content, and format on a budget under $30,000 for 10,000–12,000 printed copies. Every design decision had to be both visually strong and production-smart.

Strategy + Stakeholder Collaboration

I took the lead on collaborating with Admissions starting in January 2024. I facilitated our initial brainstorming session using a FigJam board to map priorities and align on goals. In February I helped lead a follow-up retreat where we developed a positioning statement and mapped the school's personality on a series of spectrums (traditional vs. modern, buttoned-up vs. free-spirited, theoretical vs. hands-on) which helped us land on a tone that was punchy, casual, and confident rather than institutional. We also ran a student focus group with Admissions tour guides who interact with prospective families daily and understand what actually resonates.

Research Insights

Three findings shaped every design decision:

Richmond is VCUarts' biggest selling point. Every student we interviewed ranked it as high importance. The city's art scene, the ICA, the VMFA, First Fridays, professional opportunities. Our competitors can't match that.

Students don't want a viewbook that feels super fancy or wasteful, but they enjoy tactile experience and interactivity. This pointed us toward different-sized inserts and an embossed cover, things that feel intentional without being excessive.

Students care more about community, experiences, student work, and vibes than exhaustive program details. For department info, they skip to the one or two programs they're interested in. This completely reframed our content hierarchy away from the old model of identical department pages toward something that leads with personality and photography while keeping program details minimal in a smaller insert and pushing students online for more.

Developing the Illustration Style

We wanted to feature our students, but the photos they submitted were often poorly lit, had distracting backgrounds, and overall were very different from each other. Rather than using them as-is, I developed a hand-drawn illustration style, creating portrait illustrations based on the submitted photos. This gave the profiles a consistent look, added warmth that photography alone couldn't achieve, reinforced VCUarts' identity as a school where making things by hand matters, and became one of the most distinctive elements of the book.

Design Direction

The visual system pairs the brand’s heavy sans-serif with an italic high-contrast serif, and the interplay between the two carries most of the energy. Headlines mix both typefaces within a single phrase, giving each spread its own moment while maintaining a consistent voice. Each section lives in its own color environment, creating variety and progression without feeling random.

The book is photo-forward, treating photography editorially with full-bleed shots, casual collage layouts, and dedicated spreads of student work. Physically, it uses smaller insert pages nested inside larger spreads, creating a layered reading experience. The main programs spread scatters all 16 program names in oversized multicolor type with student photos, reading like a collection of possibilities rather than a catalog. The actual department details live on smaller inserts behind it. Hand-drawn elements appear throughout: illustrated maps, arrows, and the line-art student portraits.

Accepted Student Package

The viewbook's visual language extended into an accepted student welcome package I designed that included a sticker pack, info card, and a scout book. The package was designed to make accepted students feel like they were already part of VCUarts and that this is a school where creativity and personality matter.

System Alignment

The viewbook redesign was part of a larger moment for VCUarts' visual identity. The concurrent website redesign with Fastspot, which won a Webby Award and a UCDA Judge's Choice Award, shared a visual language with the viewbook. Together the viewbook, website, and accepted student package represent a consistent admissions experience from first impression to enrollment

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VCUarts Undergraduate Viewbook and Accepted Student Packages, 2024