University of Florida
Summer Journalism Institute t-shirts
Context
Graphic Designer · 2009–2014
Services: Identity system design · T-shirt design · Badge & signage design · Program & presentation design · Screen print production
Client: University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (contract)
Five years of annual identity systems for the University of Florida's Summer Journalism Institute — an intensive program for high school students interested in journalism, media, and communication. Each year's t-shirt design was the anchor of a small visual system: the same graphic language carried through every camper's ID badge, room door signs, printed programs, and presentation decks used throughout the week. The shirt is what participants take home, but the identity touched everything they experienced while they were there.
Approach
Each year started fresh — a new concept, a new graphic direction. The constraint was consistent: UF colors (orange, blue, white), screen print production, an audience of media-literate teenagers who would immediately clock anything that felt generic or forced.
The 2009 shirt leads with a clean, editorial typewriter illustration and stacked type — restrained and journalism-appropriate. The 2010 design takes a more ambitious turn: the entire gator silhouette is constructed from typography, words and letterforms filling the form from snout to tail. It's technically demanding to execute and lands as something participants genuinely hadn't seen before. The 2011 design shifts to an experimental watercolor gradient sphere with hand-lettered type. By 2013 and 2014, the direction moved toward bold badge and emblem aesthetics that felt current for that moment.
Each t-shirt design also had to work as a system — the graphic extended to ID badges worn by every camper, door signs for each room, and the programs and presentation decks used throughout the week. That meant thinking about how the design scaled down to a small badge, read as a sign in a hallway, and held up as a repeated motif across printed materials. A concept that only worked at t-shirt scale didn't make the cut.
No two years repeated an approach. The brief was the same every time; finding a new way in was the job.
Outcomes
- Shirts were produced and distributed to participants and staff each year across a five-year run
- Each year's system shipped across multiple touchpoints — shirt, ID badge, door signs, programs, and decks — from a single design concept
- Beyond the design work, I was a camp counselor at SJI for 7+ years and taught a design class as part of the program curriculum