Hearing Support BOP manager Jo Sykes with Yoobee student designer Danella Tarry who gained top place for her logo.
Hearing Support BOP manager Jo Sykes with Yoobee student designer Danella Tarry who gained top place for her logo.
A group of design-mad Tauranga teens are breathing new life into local charities.
Over the past few months Youth Guarantee students on ACG Yoobee's Vocational Pathways programme have created a slick new logo for Hearing Support Bay of Plenty and an uber-cool T-shirt design for Hillary Outdoors Education Centres.
NowYoobee Tauranga tutors are on the hunt for more opportunities to hone students' design skills and help out the local community.
"A lot of charitable organisations don't have the funds to employ the services of a professional designer for their branding or fundraising initiatives. Working with students at Yoobee can be a great alternative," says digital design tutor Tukara Matthews.
"We provide our design expertise and our students gain work experience with a real client and create work that can go towards their portfolio and end of course exhibition. It's a fantastic educational opportunity and it benefits local charities too."
Five Yoobee students worked on T-shirt designs for the Hillary Outdoors Education Centres. The winning T-shirt was created by Michael Miller and a version of it will now be sold in store and online as part of the centres' fundraising initiatives.
"The students followed a design process, conducted research, created concepts, and developed the chosen designs. It taught them how the general design process works in a real environment, how to work with a real client and how to receive critical feedback."
The project - which was in addition to the students' regular course work - took a month to complete.
Hillary Outdoors marketing co-ordinator Andie Johnson says they were delighted with the assistance from Yoobee.
"Given that our mission is to provide outdoor learning experiences for youth, it is really important that the T-shirts connect with this audience," she says.
"It is a real advantage that Yoobee student designers are from a similar generation to the students participating in the outdoor education programmes at Hillary Outdoors. This project has been mutually beneficial and we look forward to working with Yoobee on future projects."
Meanwhile, Hearing Support BOP tasked another group of Yoobee students with creating an innovative and youthful new logo, with student Danella Tarry's design gaining top place.
Jo Sykes, Manager of Hearing Support BOP found the experience extremely worthwhile.
"We felt that the name Tauranga (BOP) Hearing Association was a bit old-fashioned, and didn't really portray what we actually do. We decided to change our name to Hearing Support BOP, and with that we also decided that our logo could do with a revamp," says Jo.
It's a fantastic educational opportunity and it benefits local charities too.
"We wanted a design that was more modern. Hearing loss and deafness are usually associated with the elderly, but that definitely is not the case.
A younger, fresher look was what we needed. We approached Yoobee to see if the students would be interested in taking us on as a client.
As a not-for-profit organisation we were not in a position to pay a professional design studio to produce a design for us - but we believe we got professional results from the students at Yoobee.
We were very impressed with all of the designs they submitted - choosing just one was actually quite difficult!"
With some successful real-life design projects now under their belts, Tukara says the design-savvy teens are more eager than ever to pursue careers in the creative industries.
"This has been such a great experience for our young Youth Guarantee students. Enabling them to tackle some real design work for real clients has been very eye-opening and extremely inspiring for them."
