GFU Holiday Art Market 2024 - Supporting Student Artists for the Holidays!
Case Study Overview/Brief
The GFU Holiday Art Sale is a student led holiday art market for the George Fox University art department students to sell their work to their classmates, fellow students, and the broader community of Yamhill County in Oregon.
It’s intended to be a fun, warm, inviting event for anyone to find unique, handmade gifts for Christmas and to support students. It’s hosted annually in early December and the branding changes for the event every year since its conception three years ago.
I was responsible for creating the entire event brand identity for the 2024 market, and handling all social media promotional materials.
Sketching & Concepting
The main inspiration for me while developing the branding for this year’s market was 1960-80’s retro wordmarks and script style text. I wanted to capture something that felt handmade like the things being sold at the market, while leaning into the retro advertisement styles from the same era.
Initially, I was debating using a green and red color pallet, the standard Christmas colors. I also wanted to make it stand out from another campus event that usually takes place the night before the market, the Student Activities Christmas Extravaganza and Holiday Market, which had a softer, cutesy aesthetic for its branding in 2024, and had a pastel blue, cream, and gold theme. My final sketch before going digital is what stood out the most to me, and I used it as my base for a digital render.
The logo rendering process took a lot longer than I’d like to admit, mostly because I was struggling to find a font that captured the image I had sketched, and had decided to simply build the wordmark myself. Creating custom bespoke logos is one of my favorite things to do when it comes to logocraft, so I felt confident in creating a custom wordmark. However, I was still struggling to capture my vision for the logo, and searched through my fonts once again, eventually finding a nice script font that I rotated, added a Christmas star to, and added the market tagline below.
The Final Logo
After meeting with the students in charge of running the market this year, added colors to the logo along with a fun blob shape to nail in the retro vibes. We decided to completely avoid the red and green color pairing, and use a red, gold, and cream color palette instead.
Social Media/Marketing
Signage and Print Items
Digital Display
Signage and Print Items
Find, Follow, or Contact Me
email: info@abigaillynn.art
You can find me @abigaillynnarts on the following social media / ecommerce platforms