Hallam NCIA | Graft Creative

Illustration for Sheffield Hallam University

Showing the way for civic engagement

Challenge

Sheffield Hallam University currently host the NCIA (National Civic Impact Accelerator), which connects a network of universities committed to transforming lives and places through civic engagement.

The NCIA Field Guide is a suite of resources providing university leaders and civic engagement professionals with evidence-based methodologies, proven practices, and practical tools to help create sustainable, measurable impact through civic engagement.

The team approached me to help bring to life the online Field Guide, and create illustrations and graphics for key sections of the webpages.

28

universities have published
Civic University Agreements
on the NCIA website

5

current priority areas for NCIA;
health, HE collaboration, environment,
arts and culture and funding

Solution

I worked with the NCIA Project & Innovation Manager, Laura Poole to develop the graphics. Our first step was to have an in depth kick-off call, where Laura talked me through the NCIA and the different sections of the Field Guide. She also supplied an itemised brief detailing what each of the graphics needed to represent.

The required graphics were:

8 webpage header graphics, one for the landing page and one for each of the seven ‘essential terrain’ pages.

30 diverse and inclusive person illustrations, representing people in key roles within civic engagement.

35 small icons to help signpost and navigate within the longer form content, representing key words such as; ‘action’, ‘collaborate’, ‘evidence’ and ‘leader’.

I initially supplied a few roughs for each of the three styles, to ensure the client was happy with the style and direction. I then created a full v1 suite for their review. We then worked closely together over three rounds of amends to ensure all the graphics worked for the team and what they wanted to represent, before I supplied final artworked graphics.

Sheffield Hallam NCIA Field Guide. Civic engagement. Website design. Illustration and branding. Higher education graphic design.

Sheffield Hallam NCIA Field Guide. Civic engagement. People Illustrations and branding. Higher education graphic design.

Result

The feedback from project partners and the civic engagement community was very positive. I received several messages from the civic engagement community on LinkedIn asking how they could share the project.

The Project Manager Laura also supplied the following testimonial:

“Working with Kirsty has been fantastic for our project. We needed the visual design for an educational microsite containing a lot of research, evidence and information. She spent time with me, learning about our vision for the project. Despite the content being a new concept to her, she quickly understood our purpose and connected with our priorities. Kirsty brought our ideas to life, ensuring that our webpages have strong hero images that help our audiences understand the content. She took onboard all our feedback, and her communication was always prompt and clear. I am confident our project launch will be incredibly successful, driven by Kirsty’s visuals. She has been an incredible asset to our project team and I have been so pleased to have her with us through our development stages. I cannot recommend her enough.”