Category Archives: All

Nakia Hill

When my dear friend and colleague Nakia Hill approached me to help her get her brand together, I was enthusiastic and truly honored. We collaborated closely over a few months to develop her logo, business cards, letterhead, and the crown jewel, her website. It was a dream to reflect Nakia’s vision and creativity back to her and create this archive of her many talents and ventures. Using my new holy grail tool, Webflow I designed and built a custom site for Nakia that serves as a calling card, mission statement, and home for future visions and dreams. Thank you to my brilliant and intentional friend Nakia for letting me in on her beautiful world and helping to refract it back out into the world.

Visit the website here.

Nakia’s body of work is constantly growing, so we built a site that can grow alongside her. Plenty of room for future projects, photos of Nakia in action at her events and programming, and space to reflect her ongoing press coverage as the world learns of her talent. The gorgeous portraits you see throughout the site were shot by Paper Monday.

Business Card and Letterhead

Community is everything to Nakia. Having a way of reaching the world and connecting with her people with stationery was a cornerstone of the project.

Logo

Nakia starts all of her projects in handwriting, immersing herself in her words and letting it all flow. We wanted a logo that captures that element of her process and feels like her signature.

The Passive House Network

Starting in winter 2021, I engaged with the the team at The Passive House Network on a multi-phase collaboration to reimagine their brand. We started with a series of workshops to identify key messages and values, setting a north star for the direction of the brand moving forward. Over the next several months, I developed a brand identity including a logo package, presentation templates, social media templates, and more. The following year, we expanded the brand into sub branding to represent their education work.

Left: Passive House brand colors, designed to stand out in a field oversaturated with greens and yellows in the sustainable building sciences.
Above: The logo mark extends easily into adaptable graphic assets for materials like hero images.

The education subbranding is employed through course graphics on the organizations website.

Creatives Rebuild New York

Creatives Rebuild New York launched two projects to fund artists and their work, the Artists Employment Program and Guaranteed Income for Artists. I worked alongside their team to design two parallel brands and materials in advance of the applications for both projects opening in spring 2022.

Left: Poster designed for outreach
Above: A multilingual information session lead by program staff

Program guidelines designed to be translated into multiple languages

 

The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Seven story plinths tell the story of Dian Fossey and, educate visitors on gorilla life, and explore the conservation work of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (DFGF.) Historical images and modern images compliment the narrative, set in both English and Kinyarwanda.

A timeline celebrating the life of Dian Fossey grounds the viewer in her extraordinary story and life’s work, continued by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

A forest of two-sided, four-paneled exhibition elements engenders empathy for gorillas by sharing ways in which they live, love, mourn, and raise their families much like humans.

To protect mountain gorillas is to research and conserve interconnected animals.

A set of human-scale fabric banners welcome guests to the exhibition and introduces each section.

Visitors are invited to take a personality quiz that inspires their next steps in their paths to being everyday conservationists. Visitors can also take their photos, sealing their pledge with a pic.

The exhibition ends in a highly interactive table that allows visitors a moment of hands-on discovery around the science and research of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. You might be surprised by the significance of poop in counting and research gorilla families!

Exhibition Design (Schematic + Detailed) and Production: Joelle Riffle
Exhibition Concept by Local Projects
Concept Design: Rick Valicenti and Anna Mort (THIRST) (Graphic and 3D typology concepts, fonts and colors)
Renderings and 3D Design and Visualization: Bethel Abate (MASS)
Additional renderings: Miguel Roldán Signes (MASS)
Exhibition Design: Maggie Jacobstein Stern (MASS)
Design Principal: Amie Shao (MASS)
Design Manager: Emily Goldenberg

VOCAL NY Brand Materials

"Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY) is a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness in order to create healthy and just communities. We accomplish this through community organizing, leadership development, advocacy, direct services, participatory research and direct action." (VOCAL NY)

Imaginations of Home

Design and coordination for the BSA's multi-part exhibition "collaborative exhibition exploring the future of affordable housing in Boston and beyond."

Role: Exhibition and Graphic Designer
Fabricators: Advanced Imaging
Client: Boston Society for Architecture (BSA)

Night of 1,000 Stories

Communications and Brand Manager

Gala Branding and Materials

Gala branding and invitation, email, and save the date design

Email Campaigns

Communications and Brand Manager

Email Campaign Design and Strategy

I designed email campaigns for 826 Boston which welcome new subscribers, support fundraising events, and encourage donations to annual appeals.

826 Boston

In a multidisciplinary role at 826 Boston, I evolved and elevated existing brand materials to support everyday programming. Materials I designed like volunteer information sheets, email campaigns, and event branding inspired donations, energized volunteers, and encouraged event-sign up.

MASS Design Group

As the graphic designer at MASS Design Group, I led the development of graphic standards and collaterals for the nonprofit architecture firm, in addition to supporting partner-facing exhibition and signage projects.

Layout design and editing for a publication
celebrating craft and conservation in architecture.

A booklet promoting the firm's work

Layout design and editing for 2020 annual report

Showcasing the firm's research and advocacy work.

Joelle Riffle | America’s Essential Hospitals Research Briefs

Junior Designer, MESH Design and Development with Megan Bullock, creative director

Under the lead of my creative director at MESH Design and Development, I was contributed to a range of projects under the America’s Essential Hospitals partnership. One such project was designing the format for the healthcare network’s Institute research briefs. Following the brand guidelines that we designed for America’s Essentials Hospitals, I developed a clear and sophisticated typographic system which allows a reader space and clarity to digest complex and rich information about the Institute’s findings. The briefs include content like visual representations of quantitative data via tables, charts, and graphs, appendices, lists, and callouts, all of which have to be distinctive and legible.

To view PDFs of a few research briefs that I designed, visit:

1. Healthy Mothers and Healthy Babies: Improving Prenatal Care in the Medicaid Population 2. Integrating Care Delivery in Four Essential Hospitals 3. Virginia Coordinated Care from the Community Physician Perspective

at a glance

A design reflection on reflecting on a year. A series of 8.5x11 inch posters/pages based on the readily available grid of a year/planner and the happenings and feelings built around that structure.

Download the whole PDF here.

(under)REPRESENT(ed)

Lead Designer
Exhibition branding, graphics, and web design for Parsons Alumni Exhibition

(under)REPRESENT(ed) was an event series and exhibition hosted at Parsons School of Design in fall
2017 for which I served as planning committee member and sole designer, developing the brand identity, web design, and print materials. The series and exhibition centered around Parsons alumni of color whose creative practices explore the lived experience of race and aim to dismantle systems of racism. The striking visual weight of the logotype underscores the paradox of underrepresentation in the arts, invoking the truth in this statement through the unique titling style and the myth, through an unmistakably bold and present visual identity. A minimal typographic system which uses just one type size of a round and open typeface and a deep purple and affecting orange allows for clarity while also making a frank and plain statement.

Live site: underrepresented.parsons.edu

Exhibit Branding

Branding, wall text, and promotions for the alumni exhibition

(under)REPRESENT(ed) Exhibition Design

Joelle Riffle | Teenage Dirtbag

"Make up your mind/decide to walk with me/around the lake tonight"

Teenage Dirtbag Zine is about coming of age in the early 2000s and how that affected my attraction, sexuality, and conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The way men were represented in pop culture informed the kind of people I'm attracted to and the things I find charming and romantic and sexy. 

Contents include: 
A playlist to better explain what I mean, a brief history of me and boys and cars, a confession about being one of the guys, an offering on my favorite movie and movie guy, a musing on how being queer affects all of this, and thinking about me in the future.

Riso printed and staple-bound zine
8.5 x 5.5 inches, 16 pages

$8.00 + Shipping

Buy Here or email me at hi [at] joelleriffle.com
You can also buy a digital print which you can print at home.

And the playlist is free.

Parole Preparation Project

Logo Design

Logo design for an organization which supports parole-eligible incarcerated people prepare parole applications.

Joelle Riffle | Ladybugs

Role: Designer, photographer, videographer, writer

Ladybugs is an exploration of female (woman-identified, as well as queer and gender non-conforming) friendships.

Ladybugs aims to tell stories of strong gal pal-ships and start conversations about the importance of those dynamics and bonds in our personal lives, collective unconsciousness, and pop culture. This project is a multimedia, multi-platform experience, centered around an interview session with a few pairs of folks talking with me and each other about their relationship.

Link: ladybugs.aslittlefear.co