Millersville University Communication & Marketing
Season’s Greetings Card
Season’s Greetings Card
Illustration and Animation
Adobe Illustrator | Adobe InDesign | Adobe After Effects
Overview
During my time working at the University’s Communication & Marketing Department, I was assigned to create the 2022 Season’s Greetings card that would be sent out to donors. The service request form I was given listed the deliverables I needed to follow. The card must say Season’s Greetings on the front and cannot have any religious affiliation. The inside was to be blank and the back of the card would have the designer's name as well as the Millersville wordmark. The client was open to any form of design, illustration, painting, and photography.
In addition to the card illustration and envelope design, I was tasked to create an animated gif that would play within emails. My animation also made its way to be showcased in Millersville’s President’s Holiday update.
Sketches
With some inspiration from my coworkers, I grasped the idea of Miller and S’ville, the university’s swans, and a snow globe. Taking this idea further I began to sketch the swans around the snow globe as if they were peering in. I began to fill the snow globe with memorable landmarks on campus, such as the Student Memorial Center, the pond, and the gazebo.
Once my design was approved by the client, I uploaded my sketches into Illustrator and began constructing my graphics. I created my graphics a certain way, knowing that they would be animated in the future. The idea was for the swans to sway back and forth. With that in mind, I made sure to make their heads, bodies, and wings separate so that each part could move independently. My coworkers, again, suggested a fantastic idea of adding a small silhouette of an ice skater on the pond, and I incorporated the figure into my design.
In Progress
Once the main design was solidified, I began adding lighting to the snow globe using a Gaussian blur layer and started designing the background of the card. I decided to go with a magenta/maroon gradient for the background to make the Millersville gold pop. I also added ornaments in the corners with monochromatic colors and complementary colors to help unify the illustration. I added the Millersville University spirit mark in some of the ornaments as well, added some sparkles, and placed soft Gaussian blurred circles to act as light bouncing off the ornaments.
I designed the back of the card and the envelope using the ornaments and sparkles I created from the front of the card to have similar elements unite the entire piece. The fonts were chosen to elicit a wintery, holiday feeling in the viewer. The card and envelope were sent to the printers, printing around 800 copies, and then packaged and mailed to the university donors.
Once the card itself was completed, I moved on to create the animated gif in Adobe After Effects. I planned to have the swans lean towards the center of the snow globe, the Millersville ornaments sway back and forth, and for the sparkles and Gaussian blurred circles to fade in and out. I created the swans' animation separately in a pre-comp to isolate the animation to make the process more organized. The ornaments and sparkles were simpler to animate, and I needed to offset each animation to keep them from looking in sync. My coworkers also suggested creating a snowing effect to have inside the snow globe. So, I found a tutorial on how to create such an effect and masked it so that it would only appear in the snow globe. Happy with my work, I sent it to the client who approved it.
The media department working on the President’s holiday update wanted to incorporate my work into their video as well. So, I animated three scenes for them: a transition from the original animation into the snow globe, a slow pan down through the snow globe with foliage swaying, the street light flickering on, the lighting moving from day to evening, and the ice skater moving across the pond, and a final closing animation of the ice skater revealing the words ‘Happy Holidays’. I immediately got to work making sure every detail was in place, and that everything moved fluidly. Once my animations were done, the media department edited my animation and the President’s holiday wishes into one video. The video was posted across the university’s social media with a positive response from its viewers.
Final Piece
Below is the final illustration of the card, the envelope, the animated gif, and an embedded video of the President’s Holiday Update with all my animated scenes incorporated into it.
