Design (Copy) (Copy) — Allison Catuira

Yes, this was a student project, if you were wondering. However, it's one of my favorite pieces of design I've ever made, period. The prompt was just to make an infographic of any kind of data.

I made the most extensive list I could at the time of all the music I've ever been obsessed with, from my earliest childhood moments to the time I made this piece.

I constructed a life-long timeline, and plotted singers and groups in their respective spots. The size of the bubbles indicated how big of a fan I was, and they're all color-coded by how embarrassing I find them now.

I added anecdotal information where I could: not only was this presenting information, it was also telling a story.

Some plots were denoted by number only, because these groups or singers had more shallow or shorter impact on me. The hows and whys of each number were explained in a supplemental list.

This is a funny little work in progress.

Several years ago, back when Parson's Chicken and Fish in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago was a long-abandoned Dairy Queen, I wondered what would ever open in its place. There were only one or two coffee shops in the neighborhood at the time, so what if it was a cafe and donut shop? What started out as riffing between friends became a logo and branding exploration. I'm still surprised Logan Square doesn't have a donut shop yet. I’m still messing about with an online shop setup, so that’s next.

Another project I worked on while at the Marketing Store was developing some concepts for a refresh of their $1-2-3 Menu program. I took this as an opportunity to incorporate the influence of handpainted grocery signage - informative, full of personality, and the opposite of snobby.

I had the honor of working on the redesign of McDonald's McCafe brand and packaging, which launched in September 2017 and ran for about a year. What started as Pinterest and mood boards, turned into a mess of iterations, refinements, and ultimately an updated, modern look and feel for McCafe.

With most projects, I scour the internet, magazines, and whatever else catches my eye that fits into the proposed platform. These get put into several spreads and whittled down.

I keep a running Pinterest board specifically for food and drink branding and packaging. I like seeing how people create systems and build narratives with food brands in particular. It came in pretty handy on this project and I pulled a lot of inspiration from it.

This was probably the third or fourth set of artboards. Everything from flat colorblocked illustrations to hand-drawn muffins to photography. The lower left design was the jumping off point for what was to come.

I had a lot of fun making the the full packaging suite for this - everything from napkins to coffee carriers. The goal was to keep it fresh, modern and in line with McDonald's current global packaging, but still familiar to longtime customers by making the golden arches yellow a prominent color.

In 2018, I completed the General Assembly visual design course, in order to to brush up on digital best practices and go more in-depth on designing a site from the ground up. This is the landing page for a fictional streaming music service, BEAT.BOX, which mines daily activities like step count, exercise logging, location check-ins and image geotagging to build custom playlists for individual users.

Looking at it now, as someone who’s learned even more about best practices and accessibility concerns firsthand, there is so much room for improvement that I’m probably going to revisit this soon.

Concepts pitched to McDonald’s for a millennial-friendly delivery service in New York City.

Subway station ad (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Subway station ad

Subway car ad (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Subway car ad

Window cling (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Window cling

Minisite (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Minisite

Minisite/landing page within McDonald's site that logs user into Doordash

Social media examples (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Social media examples

Tray liner (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Tray liner

Crew tee (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

Crew tee