Project purpose or objectives

During the last few months, I have had the opportunity to participate as a Director for the Elevate Competition. For nearly 4 months I was able to be head of Digital Content Creation and to help the other members of my team prepare for the Competition. So what is this Elevate Competition? Every other semester Brigham Young University-Idaho hosts an Interdisciplinary Competition for Social Change. Teams made of students from all the different Colleges on campus come together to answer a question that deals with social change. This question has ranged from Mental health, Forming relationships, and for this semester’s competition; Finding Balance.

A lot of the planning work had been completed back in the months of January to April, prior to COVID-19 canceling a lot of our plans for the spring contest. Our spring competition was pushed back this past fall, and I had the opportunity to once again participate to see this contest come to life and actually happen.

The project (samples of the work produced or the final product)

Since most of the creatives were completed before, there wasn’t as much to make in terms of posters and flyers to make. I was able to redo a previous flier for our team to hand out to advertise for the contest, but that was about the extent of the graphics and design I was able to do.

Instead, my time was spent with the actual advertising and promoting of the event, and making the final preparations. A good portion of the contest would be done virtually through Zoom, and it became my job to be the technology director to help make sure everything ran as smoothly as it could.

Challenges encountered in completing the project

With a contest over Zoom however there became lots of challenges. These challenges didn’t present themselves until the actual competition when we found that many of the rooms we had for the presenters had audio and video issues. I spent a lot of time working with others, both from my team and the teams of AV and audio employees on the BYU-Idaho campus to fix these issues, and we were able to work things out.

Project processes

Each week our team would meet via Zoom for about an hour to make assignments and plan things out. We were able to go from having no idea how to host a hybrid competition to be able to have over 200 hundred participants, with about 40% over Zoom. Each week we made new progress for how we can run a virtual event, and in about 4 weeks we hosted the first part of the contest, the kick-off event. This took place on the BYU-Idaho campus, and it is where the participants first gathered to form their teams. Then, 2 weeks later we hosted the contest itself, where most of the technical issues first presented themselves as explained earlier. The contestants were able to present their ideas to their judges, and then the top 5 teams were selected the following week. The Finals had the most audio and video issues to date, but at least it taught us some valuable lessons on how to prepare. After the Finals and a winner was chosen, we immediately went into evaluation mode to figure out what went well, how to improve, and what could be done better for future competitions if they happen in like manner.

Fall 2020 ELEVATE winners

An overview of the experiences you had

Overall I loved working with Elevate. I was able to work on my design skills and put to practice things I have learned in a real-world setting. Instead of working for a grade, I was working to accomplish something, which has allowed me to become a much better designer and to work well with a group or team. It was a neat experience to meet all virtual given the current situation of the world, and I was able to meet some great people.

What insights or takeaways you gained from the project

With this project being so virtual and different than what I’ve been used to, I have learned a lot of patience. This applies to both people and technology, and without it, the project will fail. I have gained a much greater appreciation for digital communication and will take the skills I have gained into future projects and careers.

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We started by reviewing everything that went well and things that could be improved on. We spend a good long time writing up some evaluation reports so we can talk about it as a team, in the hopes that it would help the next competition go even better if the circumstances are similar. We even spent some time talking about possible topic ideas to get ahead start on the planning process for Spring semesters ELEVATE. Although I will be unable to participate as a director, I gladly will pass the mantle onto other able-bodied souls with the same desire to help other students create social change.

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Very similar to the ELEVATE competition that happened a few weeks ago, the Finals are a place for the top 5 teams to present to a panel of judges consisting of members of BYU-I faculty. We had 6 judges to help determine which of the ideas from the finalists could be presented to the President Executive Group (PEG) for the possibility of the ideas being implemented into BYU-I. The 5 finalist teams had a week from the first competition to review, reflect, and refine their presentations for the chance to win at the Finals. Of course, not everything went smoothly, but we were able to make it work.

 The hardest challenge was making it possible for people to present over Zoom and in person at the same time, while also allowing the audience to join in and view from Zoom as well. The reason it was set up this way was to allow people to see the presentations, while also keeping people safe during this pandemic by not smashing tons of people into the same room. I spent about an hour trying everything to get things all set up for the presentations, and with the help of the AV crew on campus, we were finally able to start, albeit 15 mins late.

Our panel of judges

The presentations then went on for the next hour or so, which consisted of the presenting of the idea, and then a Question-and-Answer section from the judges. After the final team presented, the judges came together and determined a winner. The winner for this semesters ELEVATE competition was Inukshuk, an app that could be created to help students keep track and record their progress on the journey to find balance. Not only did they win the competition, but they also won some cool prizes from the BYU-I bookstore.

Team: Inukshuk

I am very grateful to see the “final” event of this semesters ELEVATE finally come to fruition. One may say that we are done, but now we get the opportunity to start planning for the next ELEVATE competition for Social Change!

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Now how did everything work given the current pandemic? That question has been on our minds for a long time. With the competition on Thursday, we had to have everything squared away by Tuesday night which was the Director Preview. For that meeting, one member from each team met with 2 of our other directors for them to receive their final instructions on how to present, whether that would be in person, over Zoom, or a mix. Then, in a last-minute meeting on Wednesday, we received our final assignments for our stations, and Thursday was all set and ready to go.

The ELEVATE Directors

Now of course it would not be any sort of event without any difficulties, right? You would be correct. Our first hiccup was that 2 of the scheduled rooms were not actually set up for Zoom, so there was neither sound nor video for the projectors. We scrambled to find other rooms to use, and thankfully by the grace of it being a non-busy night on campus and the I.T. Department of BYU-Idaho, we were able to get new setups for the judges and teams. I was stationed outside one of the 4 rooms to get teams checked in prior to their presentation, and also a runner for any other things we needed for the other rooms. We were able to get all 38 teams to present, and our lovely judges were there to help choose the top 5 teams for the Finals, which will be held next week.

One of the participating teams.

It’s amazing how much stress can accumulate over the months in preparation for an event such as this. However, the feeling of relief once it’s done is an amazing sense that I don’t ever get to experience. I am glad that I have been able to help organize this contest and am really excited to get to help run the finals next week. The teams did such a good job on their presentations, and we are so grateful for their participation.

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Once again I have had the opportunity to help out with the ELEVATE competition for Social Change. The original plan was that the work that I helped put into the event back in winter from January to April would allow us to carry on the event in May. However, the world had other plans and due to COVID-19, those plans had to be altered.

Since around the end of July, I again have had the opportunity to be a student director for ELEVATE. The new goal was to hold the event this month in October, and thankfully we were able to move forward with those plans. These past few months have been filled with countless meetings to review what needs to be done and make new assignments. Although most of the posters and fliers were made back when I was apart of ELEVATE at the beginning of the year, those designs needed to be updated to reflect the new dates. As the other members of the visual team are no longer participating, I have been the “solo” graphic designer to help with the designs, and have been able to help change and update our flyers and posters. I have had help from other teammates, but as the only one who has had any experience with Adobe Indesign, the mantle fell on my shoulders.

Here is the flyer I help make/update

However, these last few weeks more time has been spent going through the logistics and planning an event. On October 15th, we held the Kick-off Event to start off the competition. This event was to allow the participants to learn about the competition, as well as form their teams that they will present their idea. In the days leading up to the Kick-off, I was able to help put a video together to explain what ELEVATE is for those who were unable to come to the kick-off or even those who participated in zoom. We were able to film and edit the video in less than a day, and it helped set the tone for what we hope the competition to be like-fun.

Now that the Kick-off event has occurred and the competition is well underway, these next 2 weeks will be us preparing and planning for the Oct. 29th when the teams present their ideas, and then the finals on Nov. 5th. A lot of work needs will be going into getting these events ready to go, and I am excited to continue working with my team to pull it off.

Just for fun, our team has met mostly over zoom, but also in person a couple of times. In one meeting in particular we talked about treats and had some to test out. Here is my team I have been working with!

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During the last few months, I have had the opportunity to participate as a Director for the Elevate Competition. For nearly 4 months I was able to be head of Digital Content Creation and to help the other members of my team prepare for the Competition. So what is this Elevate Competition? Every other semester Brigham Young University-Idaho hosts an Interdisciplinary Competition for Social Change. Teams made of students from all the different Colleges on campus come together to answer a question that deals with social change. This question has ranged from Mental health, Forming relationships, and for the next competition; Finding Balance.

As a member of this team, we had one purpose that we worked towards for the last few months. That purpose was to get everything ready to go to be able to host the event. This ranged from creating posters for advertisements, writing up the guidelines and styling them for the contestants to read and understand what their goal will be for the event. We even created Social Media Posts, although social media and the writing aspects were not what I spent my time on. As part of the Visual team subgroup, we were tasked with creating anything visual This meant finding pictures for the guidelines, creating the posters as previously mentioned as well as any other graphic that was needed for the guidelines, or anything else in general. We had 4 months to finish all these things so that the next semester where the contest is being held, all that would need to be figured out and organized is the event itself, as all the advertising elements are already made and finished. We worked hard with our team, as well as the others on the board to make sure everything was good to go for the competition event.

Visual Team and Guidelines Team meeting together. I am on the far right.

The project :

Some of the visual team’s tasks were simple, others were harder. For the most part, I spent a lot of time doing photography research on free to use a website such as Unsplash or Pixels to find a picture to fit our theme so that we would not have to go out and make our own. Besides that, the rest of the work I did was on posters. We had a few different styles and versions for different parts of the event. Here are a few examples of the work I did.

Challenges:

Throughout the entire project, we only experienced one major challenge, and that was the emersion of the Worldwide pandemic of COVID-19. In late March when it hit the US, the government instructed us to not gather in groups, and so our teams were not able to meet in person. luckily we had been able to get a vast majority of everything done, so not being able to meet together was not the end, but what we did not foresee was the end of Elevate was nearer than we thought. It was decided to postpone the event to a later semester, as BYUI had decided not to hold on-campus classes for the Spring semester. Since spring was when the event would be held, all our plans and work came to a staggering halt. We were able to put some final touches on the specific assignments we were working on, but then that was it. We were done. We won’t be able to see the fruits of our labors, but not everything can go according to plan. It was a huge challenge that is still on our minds because now we have to try to figure out how to hold an event in the future when those apart of the original planning process aren’t able to be there. We shall see how it goes, and hopefully, elevate will continue in the fall.

Project processes:

Our group of individuals was a well-oiled machine. Our head Director Caryn Esplin who is the associate dean of Interdisciplinary Studies, once told us that we were much more effective in the planning process than previous directors. Each week on Tuesday we would meet as a whole group to discuss progress and talk about what needs to be done. Then we would break off into our separate teams, Visual and guidelines, and get to work on those tasks. During the week on our own time, we would continue to work on our separate projects and then meet back up the following week. This process was very effective as it kept us accountable to each other and motivated to get the work done. We maintained this for months until we were told not to meet anymore. By that point, we simply worked from home to finish up our projects and are where we are today.

Overall Experiences:

Overall I loved working with Elevate. I was able to work on my design skills and put to practice things I have learned in a real-world setting. Instead of working for a grade, I was working to accomplish something, which has allowed me to become a much better designer and to work well with a group or team. As a whole team we had so much fun, we became close friends being able to joke around and have fun, while still staying focused and on task. It was a fantastic experience and I hope I can participate in the execution part of the event whenever that is, but only time will tell.

Insights/Takeaways

As previously mentioned, I gained some great things from this project. I now consider myself a much better graphic designer and can work with a team more efficiently. I learned how to research different styles of posters and work done for past Elevate competitions and use that in my own way. I learned that there is a fine line between being independent and working things out on my own and the opposite, reaching out for help. I had to swallow my pride from time to time and reach out to my teammates to help me finish my work. Most importantly, however, I like to think I gained a greater appreciation for critiques. Many times my rough drafts were not accepted and I have to redo them. The critiques were not harsh per se, but still, it is hard to be told no on something that you made. I learned to accept the critique and move on. That was my greatest take away from Elevate.

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Yet before the announcement was made late last week, I had spent some time working on some drafts to use as posters to advertise the event. Most of my time was spent on this because it was surprisingly challenging to decide which information would be most beneficial for anyone to come across while we were promoting the event. I was given access to the final copies of the guidelines to pull information about what Elevate is, what IDS is all about, and how people can get involved. My informational drafts were very rough I just could not decide which information to include while not allowing the poster to be “busy”. I was able to spend a few hours going over that, and then the announcement to postpone elevate was decided officially earlier this week. So my time was diverted elsewhere.

Since we were unable to meet as a team per the guidelines to avoid large gatherings, this week’s time was spent thinking and pondering what I wish I could do to help elevate. I put a lot of thought into this, because at the beginning of the semester I had some ideas for what I thought I would be doing personally, and we didn’t quite get around to those things. I ultimately decided that what I wish I could do for Elevate would be to help make a new promo video from the footage that was taken at the last event. A group on campus has been trying to make what we would like, and whether it is miscommunication or errors on both parties, the editing is not happening the way we would like. I would help my teammate luke, another video student, and together we would take it upon ourselves to make the promo. I would also want to make more graphics and designs, whether that would be in the form of illustrations or stickers, just as fun little things to hand out at the event and at the promoting booth we would have.

While it is sad that my project with Elevate ended sooner than expected, we were still able to get most of the things needed to have the event. While there are still lots of things to do with the actual event itself, we were able to get most of the planning done this semester. I am not sure If I will be able to return come Fall semester and the putting on of the event (hopefully), but I am grateful for the things I have learned this semester, along with how to navigate the last couple weeks with all the changes.

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It started out 2 weeks ago after the visual team had been tasked with creating a poster and finalizing the visuals for the guidelines. We met up on a Monday night and spent around 3 hours finishing up those things before the deadline, which was the next day. We finished with the pictures on the guidelines and I spent a good amount of time making some layouts and ideas for some potential posters. Unfortunately, most of the ideas were not approved, but I was able to finalize one that we then printed out for our booth we were going to be having the following week.

The remainder of the time for that week was looking into more comedic/laid back ideas for posters that we could then present at our next meeting. After a couple of hours of looking we had a solid amount of ideas so that we would be ready. In order to help get the word out about our event, we set up a booth on campus where I and another group mate passed out fliers. However, the timing was not as good as we had hoped and we did not receive the amount of foot traffic that we had hoped for, so it was kind of a bust. Yet we didn’t stop there and went around to a few of the colleges on campus and talked with their main offices about getting fliers to the professors, which worked much better.

Overall I don’t have as much to report on personally. All of my updates go along with my teammates as we are trying to get our posters made to put up on campus as well as finding ways to let the people know about Elevate. I hope to have more to say in my next update, but for now, farewell.

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On Feb 10th I met with our faculty mentor and another Visual teammate and we spent a couple of hours creating the cover for the guidelines of the event competition. We were able to obtain our “featured image” and took a good bit of time designing and coming up with some different options or variations that we could use. Here is an example of one of the options we came up with.

The next step was to present the different options to the entire team, and although I was unable to attend that section of the meeting I was informed that all the options were great. We then moved on to working on finishing up guidelines, and I was given the task of designing the calendar that had all the important dates. it was a simple task, create the boxes and add the numbers, but where the challenge lay was in the colors and the text. The color scheme did not transfer over in the program I was originally using, so I started over in Adobe Indesign, which was much easier to use. The calendar turned out great, but the real fun I had was in making the fliers that we will hand out at the booths we have set up on campus. After many hours of tweaking, this I what I came up with and got unanimous approval from the team.

It was a great couple of weeks. I was able to get a lot accomplished and help the visual team finish up with our projects. Although these two things seem simple, the process of making them was quite intensive. I have learned a lot these past 2 weeks and am ready to report on my next projects in a couple of weeks.

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What is Elevate?

Elevate consists of a presentation competition advocating for social change. hundreds come together to find solutions to common questions plaguing our day to day lives. To organize and put on this contest, leaders are chosen to make it all happen, and that is where I come in.

As a member of the team of directors, I am part of the Visual Team making anything and everything visually related, and I have made a lot of progress. Overall I have put in roughly 15 hours into this project, and expect many more hours will be coming my way. Nevertheless, let me give you a quick rundown of what we have accomplished.

We started out as a team without a topic or really any idea what we were doing. After meeting to introduce everyone and present the idea for what this competition is all about, Teams were made and we left with the task of brainstorming ideas for our topic. After stewing and thinking for about a week, the ideas were presented at our next meeting and the topic was chosen! We chose to find balance, and from there were assigned teams, one for the writing aspect and one for the visuals. And that’s where I come into play. At first, the only real thing I could do is to do photo research on the topic in hopes that somewhere the inspiration for our logo and brand could be found. I spent hours combing through royalty-free images, but nothing was really sticking. It wasn’t until we found the idea of a photo of Balanced rocks as our logo that was really able to narrow down our search.

Throughout this entire process, I was wondering what more could I do? My fellow teammates had each taken an aspect of the visuals and were rolling with it, but I felt out of place. Now after putting my effort forth, I have taken charge of the designing and executing of the fliers and posters we will be using throughout the next two semesters in both the preparation and advertising of the event. It is giving me soo much more fulfillment knowing that I get to make something great, but unfortunately, I do not have the logo yet and can not at this time give an update on how that is going.

Overall I love being apart of this team and am excited to see how I progress not only as a designer but as a person. Finding balance is so important, and I am looking forward to adding more updates in the future on Elevate!

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