Over the course of both semesters, I helped work on the annual Transmedia event held at the University of Winchester. I was in charge of creating the main logo used for the event and stickers, and controlled the social media accounts on the run-up to the event.

Logo Design

The first thing we all worked on were initial logo sketches since we would all come up with ideas then decide on what our fellow students liked the most. I started with finding ways to merge the letters ‘T’ and ‘M’ and eventually moved towards merging them with a brush stroke effect. I took this idea to Photoshop where I was able to find a font named ‘Black Bruno’ which, with a little bit of editing, was able to give me the logo idea I had on paper. This was the loo design presented to the class and was chosen as the final logo for Transmedia 2022! 

transmedialogos

Merchandise

My first area to work on after the logo was the merchandise, I began by working on the stickers. My first ideas consisted of random designs I tried out for the logo before working on it properly, but I decided to stick to designs that matched the branding of the event better. I also had the idea of recreating different technology brand logos and changing the wording to Transmedia, but there were possible copyright issues I didn’t want to run into. The other part of the merchandise I had to work on was t-shirts. I didn’t jot down any initial ideas for these designs but instead just experimented on Photoshop and Illustrator to create interesting designs. My favourites are the brush stoke ones as the brush links into the imagery of the event and also seems the most fitting overall.

Social Media

My other aspect to work on aside from the logo and merchandise was the social media pages, I worked on a feed for Instagram as that would be the best way to promote it since it’s the most popular platform amongst students and is most fitting for a visually-orientated design event. I linked the Instagram to the official Transmedia Facebook page as well so I could increase traffic from the other demographic that are more active on that platform.

 For the Instagram feed I wanted all posts to merge together well when somebody views the feed from the profile page, I got inspiration for this idea from an account called @rap.ranked which connects the images from each individual post into one big design piece, the use of the Preview app was especially helpful as it allowed me to make sure all the content would appear how I expected before actually uploading it. I executed this idea successfully for the first few posts I created in the first semester but I later found out I needed to create a lot more content than originally planned. I would’ve loved to carry on this design theme but I realised it wouldn’t be feasible time-wise with the amount of posts I needed to produce and regularly upload.

My original plan only consisted of 15 posts but we later understood that posting every day in the months leading up to the event would gain a lot more traction for the Instagram page in terms of publicity and traffic. I figured the most convenient and appropriate way to create this many posts would be to focus on displaying work from the students in the Digital Media pathway, this would give followers an insight into what they could expect to see at the exhibition as well as promote students work. The way I went about displaying these projects was by creating 6 different templates, one for each different pathway that also corresponded with the colour scheme used for each pathway in other promotive material such as the posters and business cards. I made sure to include the paper rips which is a significant theme in the ‘Breaking Out’ narrative the exhibition was following this year, as well as the icons used by other members of the branding team in their work. Not only would this make it more convenient for me to create a higher number of posts but it also provided a structured theme to run through the Instagram feed. 

 

I didn’t want the feed to exclusively consist of these templates however as it would become quite repetitive which I thought could be quite unappealing to the followers, I got in contact with other students to send me work which I could create individual posts for to make the feed more interesting. I made sure to make use of projects that could draw in followers from other audiences, for example a couple of pieces of work consisted of NFT designs and the creation of popular animated characters in 3D which both have a large following on Instagram (the main NFT and Pixar hashtags have a combined total of over 20M followers). Not only would this bring more attention to the students work and possibly increase their personal following but it would also get more people interested in the event. This later proved to be effective with the posts becoming some of the most reached over the course of the campaign.

When asking for content, I specifically requested any interesting video content I could upload as I would be able to turn these into reels, after conducting research I discovered these types of posts have huge benefits for growing smaller pages. There is increased visibility when they appear on users’ explore page as they take up twice as much space as image posts and the movement of the content catches the users attention more compared to still images. You can also add Instagram sounds to these reels so when users are browsing content using a certain song or sound, they will come across the content which it was used with. Instagram also promotes reels onto users feeds, even when they aren’t following the creator, more than normal posts so there is also a chance to increase traffic that way.

Other than promoting students work, an important role of the Instagram page was to promote and provide information about the exhibition itself. I used my graphic design skills to create visually appealing posts to engage the followers whilst informing them of important information such as the date and location of the event, where they can find the website and other informative posts.

Transmedia 2022 was a group project between the whole Year 2 cohort, so I made sure to use other students work for the event to help promote and excite people on the lead-up to it. Students created posts for their own personal accounts displaying the assets that they were helping create for the exhibition, I reposted all of these as stories so the followers could get a sneak peek of what to expect to come across at the exhibition such as visitor cards and posters. These posts also helped generate traffic from the student’s design pages towards the Transmedia page, and reposting them helped bring attention to the Transmedia page followers to their pages.

Highlights were another useful feature I made good use of, these allow people to keep certain stories pinned on the profile permanently. I created stories featuring student  work, information about the newsletter and the #uowdmd hashtag. This meant whenever new followers viewed the page they were able to browse through these and check out the important stories they missed.

Analytics/Reflection

(as of 04/05)

Using Instagram’s professional dashboard, I was able to measure the success of the Transmedia page using analytics. I was able to see that since I took control of the account I was able to help it gain an increase in 59 followers to get to 116 followers which is almost double the amount it was at beforehand. I am pleased that I was able to attract this many new followers to the Transmedia page that weren’t just from Winchester but from other areas of the UK such as Marlborough, London and Poole. The total reach was just as impressive with a total of 4,704 account, with 4,607 of these being non-followers shows that I was using effective content and hashtags for the posts to appear on this many peoples explore pages and other areas the content might of popped up. 

I noticed that when it came to posting, reels were a lot more successful in gaining reach compared to normal posts. 4,159 people had seen the reels I posted despite only uploading 8 different reel posts. Whilst I believed I was making good use of reels, in hindsight I should’ve focused on them a lot more, especially considering 4 of the reels had more reach each than the #1 reached static post.  

Based off these statistics, I believe I did a successful job of controlling the social media for Transmedia 2022. I was able to design creative posts to show off the students work and promote the exhibition whilst gaining a high increase in following and interactions. I also made use of networking with other students to help both promote their personal projects as well as getting them to help promote my content. The exhibition has not taken place as of yet, but hopefully this page has a positive effect on the amount of people attending the event on May 12th!