This weekend, ITHACON is back for its 45th edition celebrating pop culture, creativity and entrepreneurism with a new student-designed logo.
ITHACON is planned and managed by students enrolled in the School of Business’ ground-breaking ITHACON: Promoting and Managing Conventions course. Over the course of the semester, the class forms teams to focus on numerous task and disciplines including strategy, analysis, public relations, social media, database management/registration and more. Two students also diligently focused on refreshing the brand’s logo.
First-year Exploratory major Cassie Vaz worked closely with Sophomore Art major Leanna Yatcilla to reboot the ITHACON logo. The goal was to reflect the brand’s evolving personality and to make the logo bolder and more impactful across all platforms.
Vaz said that the new logo was inspired by comic publisher logos, graphics, and comics themselves, as well as textures colors and styles reminiscent of comics. “My participation in the logo creating process was a brainstormer-- to help establish what direction we wanted the logo and the rest of the ITHACON graphics. The process is incredibly long and tedious, and the ITHACON Team as a whole is extremely ecstatic about the result.”
Vaz and Yatcilla collaborated during many meetings and spent hours outside of class creating what can now be seen all over campus, in CNY and nationwide. Yatcilla only began using the Adobe Creative Suite this Spring and quickly put that information to use. The logo was made using Adobe Illustrator and took weeks to finalize.
“This being such a big return with convention in-person as well as it being our 45th, we knew we needed to up our game. The color palette feels refreshing and lively, while the classic halftone dot pattern reminds you still of classic printed comics,” Yatcilla states.
After the debut of the new logo and the creation of this year’s posters, other ITHACON team members visited comic book shops across New York State to spread the word about ITHACON 45. Yatcilla says that seeing photos of comic book shops in New York City holding the posters was surreal. “It makes you feel so proud of yourself and your team to be working on something this special together.”
“In my career, I’ve designed and re-designed so many logos – everything from OREO to Snuggle to tech start-ups,” said Ed Catto, who teaches the ITHACON class. “I have very standards for logo design -and I’m so impressed by and proud of the work of these students. It’s professional and compelling.”
More information about this weekend’s ITHACON 45 can be at www.ithacon.org or on Instagram and Twitter at @ithaconny.
**Of note- this post/press release was written by ITHACON student Ilyana Castillo.
