AIA Dallas Columns Magazine
In September 2016, the AIA Dallas leadership commissioned my service to help them explore a new brand and visual experience for their quarterly magazine Columns.
The purpose: to establish a new brand and visual system to better represent their organizational goals of creating and engaging their audiences around the topics of architecture, culture and community. After interviews with leadership and audience surveys, I distilled and presented the survey findings to the AIA Dallas Columns editorial board and worked with their team over a period of 3 months to confirm and infuse their mission and values into the magazine's relaunch for their Winter 2017 issue.
I continue to act as the magazine's Design Director, I not only design and illustrate each quarterly issue, but collaborate with the editorial team leads to create more efficient ways to organize and collaborate with Columns contributors, translate content to the web and continue to raise the bar in the quality of the content and presentation.
AIA Dallas Columns magazine won the Honor Award for Excellence in the Promotion of Architecture Through the Media in Honor of John C Flowers Hon AIA, awarded by the Texas Society of Architects in 2017.
AIA DALLAS COLUMNS: VOLUME 34
The refresh of AIA Dallas Columns magazine launched January 2017 with the Winter issue. The Spring 2017, Summer 2017 and Fall 2017 issues all carried the same color and thematic representation of each quarter’s theme, which was carried throughout each issue. Additionally, the concept behind the prevalence of all-blue covers for the first volume of the refresh was to create a discernible rainbow of color on an architect's bookshelf years down the line. The team was excited to imagine the readership wanting to display their collection of issues to further advance and show the importance of continuing the conversation around architecture, design and community.
You can see all of the AIA Dallas Columns issues at issuu.com. The Columns refresh was revealed in the Winter 2017 issue.
SURVEY RESULTS
Before presenting the new system, the results of the survey sent to AIA Dallas leadership and Columns readership to define and establish the personality of the magazine’s refresh.
MASTHEADS + MOOD BOARDS
The survey results yielded two personalities, which drove 4 visual concepts for the masthead. These were accompanied by mood boards and preliminary mock ups of cover styles to show the opportunities available to use typography, illustration and photography to convey the personality and mission of AIA Dallas through Columns in a more compelling way.
