Better than Rocky 3
June 20, 2011 • 4:48 pm • POSTED BY anna hartley
A year ago at this time, Kelly Dorsey and I had just completed the first and second Loyola University Maryland search pieces—a two-part direct mail campaign targeted at sophomores and juniors in high school. They hit the mailboxes, and they were successful, and that was great, and we were happy.
But when we were asked to expand the two-part mailer into a four-part series, we were honestly a little worried. Visions of Rocky 3 & 4 (and every other half-baked sequel/ made for TV movie) began to haunt us. Even though the four pieces would be tied together by identical format and materials, we wanted to create something new and unexpected—and to give the reader a glimpse into the school from a completely original angle.
We started Piece Three from a bird’s eye view: deciding that we would focus on campus life, and bring to light the fact that every student has enough activities, tasks, and experiences to keep them busy all four years. At the heart of this idea is the notion that no two people can possibly experience Loyola in the same way—and that’s a good thing.
What resulted was a piece that transitioned from the conversational “Loyola voice” straight into three first-person narratives, written from the point of view of students with vastly different Loyola experiences. Our inspirations were wide: the writing style from those Papercuts ads, the kinetic energy of the Euro trip montage from The Rules of Attraction (minus all the sex and illicit drug use), David Foster Wallace’s use of simultaneous stories and footnotes, and Maira Kalman’s hand-drawn typography.
The manuscript was long and full of blocks of text—but that was the point. We wanted each story to be something that you had to dive into to experience. Something that was so subjective that you couldn’t help but imagine the type of student who would embody this voice and engage in all these activities on campus. Each story was then paired with its own hand-drawn typeface (many hand cramps and late nights later).
Check out some of the pictures of what we came up with, below. Of course, while this was happening, we were also concepting Piece Four…but we’ll leave that one for another blog post.
