SUSTAIN is a digital initiative from WEDU PBS, focused on the relationships the local community has with the environment. SUSTAIN shares stories concerning changes in our physical surroundings, and explores food, home, lifestyle, and seasonal events.
I was tasked with creating the branding and collateral for this initiative. The only request for aesthetic was to include blues and greens, to evoke a mental image of the environment and general sustainability.
For the logo, I combined a water droplet and a leaf, blending them to form a middle-ground shape. I then repeated the shape in reverse, and overlapped them to form a four-pointed diamond in the middle—this diamond is a nod to WEDU PBS’ history, as the station’s logo used to be a four-pointed diamond. I chose six colors for the Sustain color scheme, and found various brand imagery to contribute to the campaign aesthetic.
SUSTAIN has become a wide-reaching collection, spanning on-air video broadcast, multiple digital web series and related video libraries, an extensive blog with tips and a monthly email newsletter, special documentary presentations, a social media campaign, and print and digital advertising for the program overall. I created the different elements of the initiative’s branding and graphics across this spectrum (though I did not create any videos or actual topical content within the initiative).
Email Newsletter
The monthly SUSTAIN email newsletter has been around for a few years now, so I’ve found brand imagery for a variety of sustainability topics across all the blog articles and emails. Here is a selection of digital email headers.
Print advertising: Tampa Bay Times
As part of the advertising campaign to increase awareness of the SUSTAIN program, WEDU PBS ran print ads in the Tampa Bay Times Sunday print edition and Wednesday food print edition.
Print advertising: WEDU PBS Premiere Magazine
WEDU also had me design ads for run in our print and digital magazines to promote the initiative and attract readers and viewers to sign up for the email newsletter. Here are four ads (of various sizes, inserted as space allowed) that ran in WEDU PBS’ Premiere Magazine in the last couple years.
Style guide for collaborative work
I developed a mini brand guide for the initiative as well, so that other content creators and freelance artists working on the project could create new graphics from approved templates.
These other employees’ graphics intermix with my own across the many different devices and platforms on which SUSTAIN is made available.
