Senior Graphic Design Project – TBS’s Collaboration with USF St. Pete

A collaborative partnership between the Tampa Bay Surveillance Project and senior students from the University of South Florida Graphic Design Research class began in Fall 2024. Led by Associate Professor, Jenny Yucus, the students have shared their awe-inspiring talents by creating a unified branding system for our project. Incorporating such details as the study’s background, objectives, target species and features from our sampling region, each student’s designs have showcased their unique interpretations and individual styles. The TBS crew were tasked with choosing one branding system to best represent the project. From the 11 incredible options, landing on one was no easy task.

Students presented their work, explaining how they landed on the many colors, shapes, and typographies, and shared how their deep dives into the details of the TBS project inspired their design processes along the way.

We saw mock-ups of designs on swag (the project got a yacht!), business cards, social media posts and even on a building facade.

Once the difficult decision of choosing a branding system was made, designer Heidi Hicks worked with our feedback to create a second iteration for TBS. Some minor tweaks have been made since ‘version 2.0,’ and the final design has replaced our previous logo. The Tampa Bay Surveillance Project is feelin’ fancy with our new brand identity! We look forward to sharing all of the ways we will use this design.

Hover over the image below to see how Heidi’s original design morphed into our project’s new brand.

We are immensely grateful to Professor Jenny Yucus and her senior Graphic Design Research students whose professionalism and skills have shone through all of their hard work. It is no easy task to deconstruct the main ideas from a complex and profoundly technical scientific project and create attractive visual representations that will undoubtedly catch the eyes of many. Our collaboration is ongoing through the semester – ending in early December. We will be sure to share more from this partnership in the coming weeks.