Promo Guide
Client | MBS: Full-time employer, subsidiary of Barnes & Noble Education
Design Problem | Design several templated themes from which the in-house print shop can fulfill orders for various marketing materials like posters, table tents, bookmarks, social media images, and monitor graphics for partner college bookstores to promote textbook buyback. Make sure a few of the themes are color-customizable. Design a catalog from which the bookstores can place orders. Use MBS branded typography throughout.
My Role | Design every theme, assemble all templates usable to print shop designers, and design the catalog. Illustrate catalog cover art. I designed every item in the catalog shown here except foot decals, yard signs, and directional signs. Work directly with in-house print shop for production.
click pages to flip through book
click pages to flip through book
Inspiration
This was an overwhelmingly large project with many design themes involved by nature. For that reason, let me focus on the illustration of the cover page. I was attracted to images celebrating diversity, and I wanted something that had a colorful and warm look to it. I embraced showing brush strokes to preserve a handmade feeling, as so many marketing materials are lifeless and dull.
Artist: Ola Szpunar
Artist: Susanna Rumiz
Creative Process
As mentioned above, designing several themes was a tedious process which would be difficult to fit nicely into a case study. But I did think it would be lovely to highlight one of the designs I made to look like snowflakes made of books. I also included a timelapse of my favorite part of the project: illustrating the cover in Procreate.
-
![]()
The printed catalogs staple-bound and thin
-
![]()
"CASH" theme poster mockup from inside catalog
-
![]()
"Comic" and "online" themed table tent mockups from inside catalog
-
![]()
Aesthetic "CASH" and "dictionary" themed poster mockup from inside catalog
Final Thoughts
Engineering good process repeatability for templates print professionals are going to consistently use every day is quite the challenge. I did my best to make all working files easily navigable with guides on how to easily change swatches to match university branding colors. I think part of the process is just understanding you can’t predict every snag. While the design and layout of the catalog booklet is an improvement from the last catalog, next time I would try to find ways to simplify the user experience of the working files even more.