AIGA Jefferson Student Group Throws Successful Unity Gala

By Lauren Faurl (Jefferson Graphic Design, 2018)

While the rise of social media helps students to connect, networking between these students is slim, and communication is often limited to those attending school together. AIGA student groups—as well as AIGA as a whole—is a great tool to bridge this communications gap. AIGA Jefferson recently created Unity: A Poster Gala, to empower and encourage young designers to keep doing what they love to do while encouraging the communication between aspiring student designers within our own community.

Participating and creating events such as Unity: A Poster Gala, truly does bring students together. It’s an amazing way to network, building friendships and create potential opportunities in the future. As students, we are the future, and the more we work together, the stronger we will become. We really encourage student groups in the Philly area to participate in events as well as create events like this. For starters: it’s fun! It’s fun, encouraging and inspiring to see students taking the time out of their schedules to create something non-school related to share. More events like these will help continue to inspire students to do things for themselves, while coming together to share ideas and connect with one another.

It’s great to meet new people, especially those who have the same interests as you. This was the first event of this kind and there were 34 posters submitted from five schools in the greater Philadelphia region, including Jefferson, Rutgers Camden, Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art and Design, and Rowan. If other schools participated and created events such as this one, our student network would continue to grow and to flourish, carrying these relationships with us into the professional world.

Upon hearing about the event, students promoted it to others at their respective schools and encouraged their peers to submit posters and attend the event. Everyone worked hard to submit posters even though final critiques were upcoming and in progress, and even those who didn’t have the time to submit posters, still made time to attend.

The event was open to anyone and was extremely well received. Student designers talked about getting more involved with AIGA as well as creating events reminiscent of Unity: A Poster Gala at their respective schools. Professional designers described the event as “well-organized” and “fun.” Other students who attended were impressed at the amount of students from other schools and wished that their majors would do something of the same.

Our AIGA Jefferson student group, as well as our “gala committee” of Lauren Faurl, Zachary Faust, Devon Strine, Eryn Griffin, Becca Lutterschmidt and Jessica Scandiffio, were extremely excited and pleased with how the event turned out. We are excited to start planning what’s next and want to encourage and help students from other schools that have attended to create and host and event like this of their own.

We had two awards: “AIGA Pick” as well as “People’s Choice.” Claire Zellin, a Jefferson University junior, won best pick from AIGA. Kori Hirsch, another AIGA Jefferson junior, won People’s Choice, with Michele Scott, a junior from Tyler School of Art, as the runner up.