Winter 2020

Welcome to a new decade, and the inaugural Nebraska Brand Report! In it you will find notes from our co-working days, announcements and additional resources to keep you updated on our brand and visual language. Also, in each edition, we will introduce you to one of the visual communicators on campus to continue building connections with our peers.

Notes from Happy Half-Hours

What We've Talked About

Together, we've hosted five monthly co-working meetings in 2019! It has been such a neat opportunity to meet other visual communicators, see what they are working on, get feedback on our designs and discuss the future of the brand. Thank you to all the individuals who come. We appreciate your feedback and involvement!Come join us as we continue the conversation about digital signage, typography, and colors.

Here are just a couple of the topics we covered in our previous meetings.

Tutorial Screenshot

Tutorials

Based on requests, we created a few tutorials covering how to do the duotone effect and how to create halftone textures on photos. These tutorials are available on Box for you to review!
Find the tutorials here
Video Screenshot

Video Assets 

UCOMM worked with Tim Svoboda, interactive design specialist for IANR Media, to update some of our video graphics into a new branding package which includes editable text templates, transitions, animating backgrounds and more. We would love to get your feedback or requests on what else to include. Send us a Slack message or email Marcelo at mplioplis2@unl.edu if you have any thoughts.

Check out the new graphics here

Secondary Colors

Secondary colors are being refined and defined! We have been discussing the secondary colors, removing and adding a few as well as clarifying proper uses in our co-working days. We will be announcing the new colors on the website in the upcoming weeks, but get a jump start on the conversation by joining us at our co-working days, every second Friday afternoon.

Join the conversation on Slack

Next Co-Working Day

Join us Friday, February 21, 1 p.m. at UComm (12th and Q)for our next co-working day! In the first hour, we'll discuss current issues and brand projects. Then, we will give and receive constructive feedback on projects brought before the group.

(Please note: this one has been moved from the typical second Friday of the month to the third Friday to accomodate the Chancellor's State of the University Address.)

VCN Events Calendar

Announcements

UNL winning entries

UCDA Design Awards

The University's "In Our Grit, Our Glory" rebranding initiative received two awards from UCDA (University and Colleges Design Association). The rebranding initiative was 1 of only 6 gold awards given out. University Communication worked on this rebranding with help from a variety of communicators and designers from all over the University. UComm also won an "Excellence" award for Jazz in June posters designed by Clint Chapman and illustrated by Denis Gonchar.

Here is some additional information directly from UCDA:

UCDA Design Show
The judges of the 2019 UCDA Design Competition evaluated 1,061 print and digital entries, awarding 234 awards—6 Gold Awards, 11 Silver Awards and 215 Awards of Excellence. This year’s UCDA Design Show was on display at the UCDA Design Conference, October 12-15 in Portland, Oregon. Winners were recognized during the conference.

Tips, Tricks & Resources

Content Aware Fill tutorial before and after

Content Aware Fill Gets an Upgrade

If you haven't used the content-aware feature in versions of Photoshop past, now may be the time to give it a try or second chance. Photoshop CC 2020 has introduced a dialogue box for Content Aware Fill that helps provide more flexibility and control with the tool. This seems to be a useful advancement on this technology that has the potential to simplify object removal in images of a lower or moderate complexity. Read more and watch a video review of the new content-aware features on PHLEARN.

Watch Video Tutorial