One look, from the homepage to the coffee mug
WebsiteLogoPrintEmail
The Gillings School is the No. 1 public school of public health in the United States, and tied for No. 2 overall. It runs more than 50 academic programs across eight departments, and works in all 100 North Carolina counties and over 35 countries. Their marketing team brought me in as their ongoing design partner.
A school that size publishes from every direction at once: departments, centers and programs, each with its own flyer and its own email. The work was one system that holds across all of it, from the homepage a prospective student lands on to the mug she picks up at a recruiting fair. Gillings is the deepest of the university accounts I carry.
I designed and built the front end of this site and handed it to the school's own team to put live on their platform. The mark, the print and the email I designed as their ongoing design partner.
So grateful for Adrial’s creativity, excellent design, and outstanding customer service. He is masterful and an essential part of our team.
Barbara K. Rimer, DrPHDean Emerita, UNC Gillings School of Global Public HealthThe pitch
Four pillars carry the whole mission
Education, research, practice, and local and global health. Each gets a photograph, a few sentences anyone outside the field would follow, and a way through to the work behind it. You can arrive knowing nothing about the school and say what it is for before the second screen.
In the news
One story leads, the rest wait their turn
The lead story gets the room, with the outlet credited underneath it. Two more sit alongside, each carrying the tag it was filed under. Eight departments publishing at once means somebody has to decide what leads this week, and a reader arrives at one story instead of a queue.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The people
Named people, in their own words
The Pivot runs short profiles of students, alumni and faculty: one photograph, one line about what they do, one story to read. It is the part of the page anyone deciding where to apply actually reads, because it answers the question they came with, which is who else is here. The ranking story sits under it, full width.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Eight ways in
Every department gets the same front page
Biostatistics through to Public Health Leadership and Practice: eight cards, each with a photograph and a plain description of what that field studies. Most people arrive for exactly one of them. They find it at a glance, and leave knowing the other seven are there.
The close
Four values, then one plain ask
Student success, community well-being, innovation and health equity, each with an icon and a single sentence. Then the page stops describing and asks: degrees, or apply. By this point a reader already knows whether they belong here, and both buttons are waiting where they finish.
The mark
A tagline, drawn for every shape it lands on
“We’re on it!” is the school's own tagline. I drew it in their brand typeface with the globe standing in for the o, so it arrives looking like the rest of what they publish, not like a separate thing. Then the same five words three ways: the horizontal line, a stacked pair for a cap front or the side of a mug, and a circular badge for a back panel or an embroidered patch. Each shape gets a drawing made for it. Getting the mark onto as much swag as possible was the goal, and that only works if there is a version for every shape it lands on.
A second mark
An initiative with an identity of its own
Gillings asked me to brand their inclusive excellence initiative so it could travel on its own. The lockup sets the two words into one block with the US of inclusive pulled forward, and reverses cleanly onto the school's navy. One mark, two colorways, and nothing to redraw when it moves from a poster to a slide.
The poster
A poster that asks for something
Photographs cascade down the top half of the sheet, then the headline lands and the copy does the asking. It carries the initiative's mark and the school's together, with one short link at the foot. A reader who agrees with it has somewhere to go in the same glance.
Recruiting
The questions a recruiter answers all day
A recruiting booklet built from the marketing team's own messages and photographs: the core curriculum, concentrations, electives, student stories, career outcomes. A recruiter hands it over at a fair and it answers the questions she would otherwise answer one at a time all afternoon. The same pages print and read on a screen.
Everywhere else
One system, every surface they publish on
Event flyers, a lecture series, the school's Healthy Impact sheet, web banner ads, an organizational chart, and a printed wall display. Different audiences, different formats, months apart, and every one of them arrives looking like the same school. See three of them in a year and you have been told the same thing three times. The largest of those surfaces is the school's magazine, Carolina Public Health and the Impact Report, which is its own project: two publications a year, designed for print and built for the web in the same pass.
The inbox
Email that looks like the rest of the school
FrontLines goes out from the school and a second template serves the departments, both built on the brand I had already made for the print work. They had been sending on an older setup that looked nothing like anything else they published. Now a reader who opens one knows where it came from in the first inch.
What holds it together
Built to be handed over
The front end was designed and built for the school's own team to put live on their own platform, which is a different job from shipping it myself. It had to be clear enough to hand across and keep running without me.
One tagline, three drawings
A horizontal line, a stacked pair and a circle. A banner, a cap front and a back panel are three different shapes, so each has a version drawn for it and nobody has to stretch the one file they were sent.
Carrying it through every piece
A mark, a typeface and a palette only hold a school together if somebody takes them through every flyer, ad, booklet and email. That ongoing application is what the partnership actually was.
The booklet ships two ways
The recruiting booklet was made as a printed piece and as a digital edition from the same pages, so a recruiter can hand one over at a fair and email the same thing to somebody who could not be there.
A newer way to send
Part of the email work was helping them off an older sending setup and onto something their own team could use, which is the difference between a template that looks right once and one they can keep sending.
Check out these other projects
UNC Center for Thriving Communities114 local governments, one way to make the caseA decision tool for the working groups recommending how 114 NC local governments spend eighteen years of opioid settlement money.See the project 
UNC Gillings School of Global Public HealthA print magazine that reads just as well on a phoneTwo issues a year for five years, designed for print and built for the web in the same pass, with an archive of 242 articles behind them.See the project 
Burk UzzleSix decades of photographs, paced like a bookSix decades of a LIFE and Magnum photographer's work, in fourteen collections paced like a book.See the project Adrial is my go-to designer for anything my business needs … which is why I have used him for three different companies over the last 20+ years.
Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.