A recent article in College & Research Libraries News discusses outreach opportunities through button making with students as “low-cost, high-impact,” (Lotts & Maharjan, 2018) and I couldn’t agree more.  Students love buttons!

Today’s button submission is from Leanne Gallety of the Davis Family Library at Middlebury College.  Leanne says,

Working off a limited budget and inspired by ‘So Many Buttons,’ I created a set of buttons to give out to students at the reference desk and during instruction sessions. I wanted them to be fun and something students might actually want to put on their backpacks, so I tried to stay away from our traditional branding (for example, we often direct students to the URL of the library website) and brainstormed for some puns that might work. We have a subscription to The Noun Project, so once I had a couple of ideas, I just picked some icons from their library and downloaded them as .svg. I mocked the buttons in illustrator to random dimensions and conveniently, Pure Buttons offers a free template for their buttons, so I could size up and preview at scale. With this template, I saw there was space to add some text along the rim of the button, so I decided to include the library name and a link to contact a librarian, in case anyone’s looking really close.

The text on the side of the button is a nice surprise to forward the library’s outreach mission.

side of button with text go/askus

Thanks to Leanne for sharing her tools, process, and product.  Remember that Leanne’s buttons are available on our Google Drive. All submitted work will be published on this site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

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