As Stanford’s Asian American Activities Center (A3C) grew its programming for the 4,000+ Asian American students on campus, each event was competing for students’ attention with inconsistent branding and time-consuming design workflows. With dozens of events to promote each quarter, creating graphics from scratch was both slow and inconsistent.

Before creating a unified visual system, I met with the leads of all 12 programs to learn about their audiences, goals and personalities. Rather than applying one visual style to every initiative, I identified what defined each program, which raised the real question: how does every event still read as an A3C event?

The answer wasn’t a single visual style, but a flexible system built around the event as the centerpiece. I decided which elements stay consistent no matter the event: the header (program pill, A3C logo and academic year), the footer, the border, the typeface (Public Sans) and the brand red. Everything inside the frame is free to change.

On top of the system, I built a library of reusable templates and layouts. They were made for speed: with the structure already in place, the team only had to worry about the assets, like graphics and photos, which doubled our output and cut design time.

Each program gets its own personality within the frame. While there is a fixed branding system, the team and faculty were adamant about allowing designers as much freedom as possible to be creative, so I created a table of branding recommendations for every program.

Templates were then made to preset some layouts, so it was easier to just plug in event details and information and find appropriate assets. Below are examples from three programs:

Flyers designed across A3C’s programs using the system. Almost all of these are digitally marketed.

This was my first time creating and managing an initiative from start to finish, and it taught me to balance creativity with consistency. Teamwork mattered just as much: beyond the core staff, multiple student employees organized and ran each event. Working in such a collaborative space on strict timelines made me more disciplined and proactive with communication.