Designing for Aviation Career Day

I first started working as a freelancer with the St. Clair County Airport in 2021 while I was working full-time at Black Creek. Ike at Black Creek approached me about helping with some designs for the airport, and what started as a project eventually became a long-standing client relationship of its own.

Since then, I’ve worked closely with Wendy, who manages the airport, in addition to Ike, who I originally worked with through Black Creek.

Another Year of Career Day

Each year, the airport hosts its Aviation Career Day to introduce the community to the different opportunities available in the aviation industry. I’ve helped create materials for the event for several years now, and while the list of materials tends to stay pretty consistent, the design itself changes from year to year.

The airport typically needs items like a save the date, program, and banner. Depending on the year, there can be a few additional pieces thrown in as well.

For the past few years, I’ve created their Career Day materials using either stock photography or images provided by the airport. This year, they had a photo they wanted to use, so I built the design around that.

Finding the Right Color

This year’s design was all about color. The layout very naturally came together, and from there, I tried several variations of the same general design, experimenting with different color combinations.

We landed on purple and teal, with the teal pulled directly from the photo. It ended up being a really good fit with the image and gave the design the pop they were looking for.

It’s always fun to look back at the designs from the last couple of years and see how different they are from one another. Even though I’m designing for the same event each year, the photos and color choices can completely change the feel of the final design.

2025

Banner
T-shirt

2024

Flyer
Banner
Alternate Flyer Concept
Alternate Banner Concept

A Few Extra Pieces This Year

This year also came with an additional need. Instead of having two entrances to the airport open, visitors for Career Day needed to be directed to a side entrance.

To help make that as clear as possible, I created a banner for the closed entrance with a QR code leading to a webpage outlining the directions to the open entrance.