Park University is a private liberal arts university in Parkville, Missouri, founded in 1875. More than 16,000 students worldwide pursue degrees at over 40 campus locations nationwide and online. Park needed a new eye-catching billboard to spread awareness about the start of summer classes. They also wanted to communicate how many of the classes (because they’re online) can be attended from anywhere you can bring a laptop, thus ideal for the summertime. Lastly, they asked if there was anything we could do with their logo to help it “pop” more. I worked together with the Creative Director at Walz Tetrick Advertising to create and execute a billboard concept that would achieve these goals.

Initial Options

We wanted to use extensions on the top of the board to visually break the expected boundaries and grab viewer’s attention. So for each headline, I found a stock image that would work with the headline, the concept of [online] classes during the summer time, and was shot in a way to work playfully with the extension idea.

Subtle Yet Effective

To give their logo some extra “oomph” without getting away from their brand colors and the campaign layout, I gave it some shadows (and subtle highlights) that helped to give it the sense of being 3-dimensional, making it appear to extrude from the board.

Final Solution

The client loved the options we provided, and ultimately wanted to go with the “Dive into the Future” concept. They didn’t like the way the bubbles in the photo of the diver seemed to obscure a lot of his body, however, so I went through many photos of divers to find a better one for this concept.