The vera project

The Vera Project, or Vera as many supporters call it, is an important local institution in Seattle. Vera is an “always all ages” nonprofit music and arts venue, providing a stage for up and coming musicians many of whom may not yet be old enough to play in more common venues like bars and clubs. The space also houses a gallery, a silkscreen printing studio, and a recording studio. The organization holds classes on silkscreen printing, sound design and engineering, live sound mixing, and more. Vera is an invaluable space for many young people in and around Seattle interested in making music or art or just wanting to attend shows.

The Vera Project was rebranded by a Seattle based design firm in 2017. Vera brought me in as a design intern to help implement their new logo and branding guidelines on many of their print materials, promotional materials, and social media. I updated many of their designs and set up their design materials as best I could for the next person who may come along to change such materials in the future. I also got to work on individual projects and marketing for events, unrelated to the new branding. Vera’s aesthetic is very DIY but clean and easily accessible. While they have guidelines for their brand they are a creative organization that wants to experiment and remain somewhat flexible in their look, which allowed me to play with their new guidelines while still making everything cohesive.

One particularly fun side project for The Vera Project involved a music festival. In the summer of 2018 The Vera Project was sponsoring an event called Low Tide Music Festival, and I was enlisted to design the poster for the event. I listened to music from the participating bands for inspiration and then worked with the organizer to decide on a general style and theme for the poster. The resulting image is a bold, typographically driven image that relies on three main colors. I wanted to include a water theme, as it was a beachfront festival, but still keep an indie and psychedelic feeling about the poster.  

Vera began the release of their updated brand in January of 2018. The experience of working at Vera was incredibly rewarding as The Vera Project was a very important place to me growing up, and being able to participate and give back to the organization meant a lot. Interning with Vera also gave me a glimpse into what it takes to keep a nonprofit organization running, a process that I find very interesting. It taught me just how important being a working part of team – not necessarily of designers but of all sorts of people – is to a small organization, and how everyone must work to keep that team going.