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Signs About Sound

A couple of weeks ago we asked for submissions about sound, and you delivered! We received three sound-specific submissions, all of which take a different design approach. It’s worth noting that in spite of these differences, the first two of our featured submissions make use of the red, yellow, green color scheme to denote acceptable noise levels within the library. The last, designed for digital signage, uses large eye-catching text and simple icons to get the message across.

The first submission is from Brenda Sevigny-Killen at the Bennett D. Katz Library – University of Maine at Augusta.

Sign that reads "Silent Zone" in a library.

Brenda had this to say about her signs:

After our library greatly deaccessioned our reference materials, we opened up space for collaborative study areas with rolling whiteboards, chairs & tables, and comfort seating.  To encourage collaborative use of this new space, staff designed signs to promote the new area.  We also designed a sign for the quiet area since the multiple tables for 6 falsely encouraged noisy collaboration. There are times when we have to redirect groups to the collaborative zone so this space remains sacred for silent study. This project has been hugely successful and we now find we need much more collaborative space as more and more students find sanctity and camaraderie within the library walls.  Another happy side effect is getting to know more of our students and subtly infusing a atmosphere of support, care, and staff dedication which we hope contributes to their success.

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Brenda’s posters were designed in Publisher and are available in our Google Drive.

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Erin McCoy at Massasoit Community College in Brockton, Massachusetts submitted designs that she created in Canva.

I was inspired by a recent conversation on a list serve to take a look at signs for “sound expectations” – I like the one in the google drive, so I decided to riff on it in Canva for those of us without Adobes or Publisher skills.

Our library is one big room, that is square, so it’s hard to place signage and to communicate where the different zones are, so we’ll see how this goes!

 

 

Kudos to Erin for tackling the challenge of signage for the one-room library layout! You can find the complete set of Erin’s signage on the Librarian Design Share Google Drive.

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Our final submission is from Lauri Miller at the Paul & Harriett Mack Library in Bethlehem, PA. Lauri created her sign through Google Slides and used icons from one of my favorite resources, The Noun Project.

Here is my submission about sound levels in the library. I created it in Google Slides which feeds the digital sign in our lobby. The sign flips between slides, so I tried to keep it brief, understandable, and eye catching the foot traffic in and out of the library.  The cell phone icon is by Creative Stall, and the earbud icon is by Erman Tutan. Both are from nounproject.com.

cell phones on silent signage

Thanks to Brenda, Erin, and Lauri for their submissions. Remember, you can submit your own work to feature or request feedback at any time. All submitted work will be published on this site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

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What’s in a Name?

Do you have a complicated name? Do you have a common name? I bet all of us fall into one or the other category, and that’s a real issue when publishing our research over time. ORCID is here to help all of us with name issues due to marriage, preference, nationality, or maybe just because our parents thought it would be easy to name us something memorable. ORCID assigns researchers a unique identifying number that stays with them throughout their career, thus making it easier to follow the publications of Janie Ngata née Janet L. Ngata-Romero.

Medical librarians seem to be on the forefront of promoting ORCID, and Sarah Visintini, a librarian at the Berkman Library, University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Canada, made the following flyer to attract faculty and researcher attention to the service during her institution’s Research Day:

Sarah explains,

I was inspired by the University of Adelaide’s flyer design, another university’s flyer design that I can’t locate anymore, and the general promotional materials for ORCID, but thought it would be fun to add a bunch of common last names at the top in different fonts. I used Wikipedia’s “Most Common Surnames” lists for Asia, North America, South America, etc to generate the list. There were a lot to choose from so I specifically chose names that I knew were common at my institution.

I love that Sarah used the look and feel of ORCID’s brand, but personalized this flyer with names her researchers could relate to. Sarah submitted both the PDF flyer and a PowerPoint slide to our Librarian Design Share Google Drive, in case folks want to use her version or instead edit the names to better reflect their institution’s researchers.

Finally, Sarah used Google Slides to make this flyer, and if you don’t already love Google Slides, you should! Veronica and I use Google Slides almost exclusively to create our presentations, as you can collaborate across distances to make real time updates. Also, you can easily take Google Slides with you on your travels as long as you’ve got an internet connection; or, if you don’t have reliable internet, you can download the slides into PowerPoint format. It’s a beautiful thing.

Psst, interested in getting your own ORCID ID? It’s super simple, just go here.

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Enhanced by Design – Presentation & Handouts

One-half of Librarian Design Share is headed to Knoxville, TN to present at the 2017 Library Collective Conference alongside Amanda VerMeulen (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) and Dan Vinson (Mount Mary University). I’m super excited to be presenting with these awesome folks, and wanted to be sure to share our presentation slides, handouts, and other resources with Librarian Design Share readers. The focus of the conference is “Make it Beautiful, Make it Useable” which was all the sell I needed to attend. The conference schedule looks amazing, and I’d encourage you to check it out.

Here’s the info about our session:

Enhanced by Design: Creating user-informed, aesthetically attractive projects for your library

In this session participants will learn how different visual materials can address user concerns uncovered through focus groups, surveys, and ethnographic studies. Products created from data gleaned through these methods aren’t inherently beautiful, but by applying aesthetic design principles to these projects we can create products where usability is enhanced by design.

What this session IS about: basic user research methods, applying basic aesthetic principles/theories to creating visual materials, design-decision making
What this session is NOT about: in-depth session on graphic design or aesthetic theory,
how to analyze user research data (no coding, no stats).

Some questions to think about before the session:
What is a problem you want to solve in your library?
What is a big picture question you have about your library/users/etc.?

You can check out our session slides below. It’s a mix of lightning style talks, discussion, activities, and Q&A. We hope the session will be interactive and fun, and we’re looking forward to learning from people who attend.

We also have a number of resources we’re sharing with participants, including:

You can also find all of the designs highlighted in this presentation on the Librarian Design Share Google Drive in the Enhanced by Design Presentation 2017 folder. If you’ll be at The Library Collective Conference too, stop by and say hello!

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Sharing Your Research

Conference Poster by Jenise Overmier - Research Skills for First Year Writing

With the ALA Annual Conference wrapping up, there are likely several librarians and library school students breathing a sigh of relief after completing a successful presentation. Super proud of your poster? Feeling like your presentation slides were on point? April and I would like to encourage you to submit your poster / slide deck designs for an ALA Conference feature post.

In the mean time, today’s post is a poster from a different conference: The Maryland-Delaware Library Association Conference in beautiful Ocean City, MD. Jenise Overmier, Instruction Librarian at American University in Washington, DC, created a great poster using a combination of Canva and Google Slides. Here’s Jenise in her own words:

Continue reading “Sharing Your Research” →

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Librarian Design Share Goes to Houston

Next week April and I are returning to Houston (a city we both love and called home for many years) next week to present at the Texas Library Association 2016 Annual Conference. We’ll be discussing ways in which libraries can adopt better visual design practices to improve communication with library users, and of course, doing a brief plug for Librarian Design Share. If you are planning on attending, or just find yourself in Houston, we’d love to see you. If you can’t make it, we’re sharing our presentation slides below.

Texas Library Association 2016 Annual Conference
Improving Communication through Visual Design
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
3:00 – 3:50 pm

Every time a librarian crafts an event poster, develops signage, creates instructional handouts, or drafts Web advertisements, a design decision is made. The co-creators of Librarian Design Share will empower attendees with the basic principles, processes, and tools necessary to develop visual materials that enhance relationships with users. April Aultman Becker, Sul Ross State University; and Veronica Arellano Douglas, St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

 

 

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Inspired By the Movies: Wes Anderson Makes All Slides Better

ACRL 2015 was amazing, folks. There were so many brilliant, passionate, friendly librarians in one amazing city that I thought my head might explode. Two of those rad librarians were my co-presenters, April Aultman Becker (also co-creator of Librarian Design Share) and Abe Korah. On Friday afternoon we presented a panel on facilitating inquiry throughout the research process and helping students develop thoughtful questions.

These are our slides.

As we were planning our presentation, April and I joked to Abe that we were going to model our slides on a Wes Anderson movie. We’re big fans of his quirky visual style and thought it might be an appropriate look and feel for Portland.

Thanks to April’s fast-as-lightning investi-googling skills, we ran into this fantastic Wes Anderson Color Palettes Tumblr and decided to use the color scheme from Moonrise Kingdom.

Moonrise Kingdom Color PaletteWe also decided to lift an additional color from Suzy’s dress, which gave us some pink for highlights and a fun background for some of our slides.

Suzy's amazing pink dressThe fonts we used were Josefin Sans and Damion, both of which are available as Google Fonts (JS | D) as well as free desktop downloads (JS | D), which is a must if you want to coordinate your handout with your slides (which you know we did).

Our icons (credited on the last slide) come from the always amazing Noun Project, and were just modified according to our color scheme using Adobe Photoshop. The slides themselves were created in Google Slides.

You can access the published version of our Google Slides above, but if you’re interested in adapting them, download them from the Librarian Design Share Google Drive Presentation Folder.

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Making an Impact with your Slide Deck

With many of us in academic libraries heading out to Portland today and tomorrow for ACRL 2015, it’s a good time to talk a little about what makes a good slide deck. Today’s submission is an example of a presentation with

  • clean lines,
  • a nice cohesive color scheme,
  • great statement photographs,
  • clear, attractive font choices, and
  • good use of text alignment for emphasis and impact.

This slide deck is courtesy of Alana Verminski, Collection Development Librarian at the University of Vermont Libraries and Kelly Blanchat, Electronic Resources Librarian at Queens College from their 2015 ER&L conference presentation:


We created the slides using Google Slides and most of the images were made using Google Draw. All the fonts are from Google Fonts. Kelly did some work in Photoshop to tweak a few of the images and the spreadsheet used in slide 10 was developed in Excel. Our presentation addressed many of the challenges (new) electronic resources librarians face when starting or transitioning into a new role. We focused on workflows and how revamping and developing new processes can facilitate the building of a new professional identity and gaining respect from colleagues.

You can contact Alana or Kelly for more information about their fantastic slides.

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For the Love of Icons

Last month April and I presented at the 2014 Library Instruction West Conference in amazing Portland, Oregon. Our session was on effective methods for teaching “experienced researchers” (faculty, professionals, grad students, thesis writers, etc.), but our slide deck was ALL ABOUT THE ICONS (as you can see). We drew heavily from public domain and CC-licensed icons available from The Noun Project, a fantastic repository of “the world’s visual language” in symbols and icons.

You can access this presentation on Librarian Design Share’s Google Drive, or better yet, take a look at The Noun Project today! Trust me: You will find the icon you need.

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Good Design Doesn’t Happen Alone

 

On Saturday I gave a short talk at the ACRL Marketing Discussion Forum at ALA Midwinter. The whole presentation, as you can tell from the title slide, was about using the people and communities around you to help you create better, more engaging visual materials for library marketing and outreach efforts. It may have been cold enough in Philly to make me wish I was in Texas in July, but the conversation at our discussion was lively and warm! I had a blast. Big thanks to Katy Kelly and Jessica Hagman for inviting me to participate, and I hope y’all enjoy the slides.

This presentation was created using Photoshop. Images were saved as PNG files and layered onto a Google Slideshow. For any of the original Photoshop files, email me, Veronica.

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