Background

The Ivy League is a nonprofit organization located in Camas, Washington. Their mission is to eradicate invasive, non-native English Ivy from surrounding parks and neighborhoods in the SW Washington region. English Ivy is considered a noxious weed in 48 states, which includes Washington and Oregon.

“Ivy can outcompete native plants, reducing animal foraging habitat. It inhibits regeneration of understory plants and kills understory and overstory trees by shading them out. Ivy can cause storm damage trees due to its added weight in the canopy.”

- Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board

The best way to remove ivy is labor intensive; pulled by hand, cut or dug out. Many ivy removal groups have formed in recent years and rely on volunteers to remove ivy, including No Ivy League in Portland, OR, and VINE in Vancouver, WA.

Challenge

Not many people are educated on how invasive English Ivy is. The Ivy League in Camas also works with a very limited grant from the Parks Foundation that helps pay for tools, equipment, flyers and signs. They rely heavily on volunteers and word of mouth, but desperately needed flyers and social media posts to attract more volunteers. My biggest challenge was streamlining the flyer design process to create an eye-catching flyer that can be easily updated and understandable, within a small amount of time.

I critiqued the last year’s flyers and recognized the problems we faced, our strengths and what we could do better. One big problem was the flyer’s visual hierarchy wasn’t clear and the information could have been presented better. The colors were bold and the illustration was eye catching, but information was shoved in areas that didn’t seem thought out or logical, which could lead to confusion and make information hard to read. I also wanted to create a logo that matched the visual direction of the flyers to create a consistent look. The clipper illustration was successful in visually showing removing ivy, but in the new flyers I wanted to design a cleaner more simplified illustration.

Goals

1. Simplify the logo

2. Design a flyer with clear visual hierarchy that can be easily updated and last for future years to come

3. Create well-designed work within a very small time frame

4. Make a flyer that can be easily adapted to use for social media

5. Promote ivy removal events around the Camas area as well as online to attract more volunteers

Process:

I mapped out the important information in the flyer by making wireframes for the flyers, and sketched out logo iterations and icon ideas. I utilized the strengths of the past Ivy League flyers, which helped streamline the process. I also talked with the Ivy League board and incorporated their idea to show a picture of the location of where the ivy removal event would be held as an image overlay. Generally the Ivy League scopes out locations before hosting an event, so images were sent to me before I started designing.

The biggest challenge with this design process was the time management. My goal was to not spend an enormous amount of time, but still come up with well-designed marketing materials. Since I had a small amount of time, I addressed problems early on, recognized strengths in unsuccessfully executed design materials and sketched to get a good idea of where things should be placed and what things would look like before getting into software.

Solution

While the process of creating the flyer system took a few hours of my time, updating the flyer and social media posts with new locations and dates only took a matter of minutes. I didn’t have enough time to do social media posts last year, but improving the process with creating flyers allowed for a social media aspect this year. We had an increase of volunteers this year, which could have been correlated to other factors. But I think it’s fair to assume that improving the visual hierarchy of the design, making the information easy to process and making social media posts may have contributed to the increase of volunteers.

I also designed a logo that branded well with the clean, minimalist look of the posters. The logo took lots of inspiration from the previous one, that was designed by another Ivy League volunteer. I refined it but still keeping an ivy illustration and a badge-like logo.