College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at MSU

Designing the inaugural issue of a publication requires a solid base of strategy, lots of creativity, a dose of efficiency and logic, a heap of technical skill, and a generous portion of great collaboration. (That last bit is easy when your clients are awesome.) While there were many beautiful pubs coming out of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University, there wasn’t one that was representational of the college as a whole. So our task was to help develop a flagship print piece to fill the gap.

Conceptualizing the perfect name, working to develop a cover and flag that set the proper tone, envisioning what can be done with photography to support editorial as well as intrigue the viewer. Those are some of the first steps. Planning for content flow, word counts, paper, page size and binding. Developing thoughtful solutions for every piece of content, from table of contents to folio. A hundred small decisions matter and affect the end result.

MSU has a very thorough and intentional brand. It’s important that marketing and editorial materials such as In The Field adhere to the brand and enhance it. The challenge, then, is to develop a piece that has its own unique personality yet supports the university’s overarching goals. We work very carefully to ensure that our creativity exists within the bounds of the brand. It’s a fun challenge. (Most of us are Spartans, after all!)