National Endowment for the Humanities
Steve Moyer
Managing Editor
National Endowment for the Humanities
Washington, D.C.
District of Columbia
Special Event or Conference
NEH event materials for the National Book Festival (NEH booth at the National Book Festival in the Parade of States)
National Endowment for the Humanities
Meredith Hindley
Andrea Heiss, Graphic Designer
Our objective was to promote the agency while also celebrating the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. The National Book Festival provides a massive audience for outreach efforts and we share our enthusiasm for the Humanities by providing beautiful free agency magazines (mag. also entered in Magazine category), posters, bookmarks, buttons, stickers to attendees. We also created historic figures as lifesize cutouts for people to interact and pose with.

These engaging outreach materials, together with informative and thoughtfully designed slide deck, banners and wayfinding signage, propel the agency brand and mission with generosity, variety and memorable quality.
The numbers of visitors to the National Book Festival was 125,000.
All design materials were grabbed up by attendees, e.g., 2500 Ursula Le Guin posters. In terms of visitor reaction, we found our historic cutouts were all over social media. Other agencies inquired about purchasing our suffrage buttons and stickers for their own events; we had similar reactions to our lifesize historic figures, the quality of which amazed people.
1 designer and 1 project manager where able to pull off this major success. In a matter of a few weeks, with other responsibilities, all our design products were written, created, approved, and produced by a variety of specialty printers.

Speaking of which, the cutouts were not simply enlarged figures. The process involved using appropriate facial likeness and matching them to historically correct figure or body parts, suitable to full length, forward facing structure. Pieces were then photocomposited in photoshop. We accessorized the figures with attributes, digitally painted problem areas, often, colorizing a black and white image.
Creating all this work and launching an organization rebranding was exciting.