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2020 Portfolio Show
The Diverse logo, with div wrapped in grey angle brackets, every letter a different color and a faceted butterfly above.

Diverse

Diverse was the 2020 North Idaho College Graphic and Web Design portfolio show, presenting thirteen graduating designers. The class named it for the wide range of designers about to graduate and set the HTML <div> tag inside the word, so the title reads both as the adjective and as the generic container element that holds whatever you put in it. The room never happened: COVID-19 turned the April 24, 2020 event into a live stream, and the students ran the identity, the site, the booklet and the video themselves.

Diverse represents the graduating cohort of 2020 and the work they developed together during their time in the program.

Thirteen graduates cut out and overlapped shoulder to shoulder in one row, each one tinted a different color.

Show Name

Diverse

Year

2020

Students

13

Pitched By

Not listed

The Concept

Why “Diverse”?

The class gave one reason, in one sentence on the homepage: the show is themed around the word <div>erse because there is a wide range of designers ready to graduate. That is the whole of the stated rationale. Everything else the name does, it does in the artwork. The letters d, i and v sit inside two drawn angle brackets with "erse" trailing past the closing one, so the title is at once the adjective and an HTML <div>, the generic container that holds whatever goes inside it. The site never spells that reading out in words. The logo does it instead, by drawing the brackets as real chevrons rather than typing them.

The identity then makes the same argument three times over. The wordmark gives every letter a different hue. The hero photographs all thirteen graduates, cuts them out and stands them shoulder to shoulder in a single row, each person tinted a different color of the spectrum. Each graduate drew a flat illustrated scene of their own, and all thirteen are clipped into the identical hexagonal frame. Same container, different content, argued in type, in photography and in illustration. What no page records is who proposed the name, who drew the mark, or what the low-poly butterfly above the opening bracket stands for.

Show Identity

The Brand Behind Diverse

The declared palette is four values in css/colors.css: green #34CC8C, blue #0f43c7, purple #710fc7 and red #cd1531, plus #111214 for the open menu panel. In practice one of them does nearly all the work. #34CC8C fills the full-width header bar, the square-cornered promo button, the five-pixel underline used for emphasis, the map pins dropped over the hero and every highlighted span inside the headline. Purple #710fc7 is the link hover. The blue and the red are declared and then barely used. Type is two Google families: Montserrat for headings, weight 800 at 4vw for the h1 and weight 700 at 2vw for the h2, and Open Sans for body copy. Sizing runs in viewport units rather than rem, so the page scales with the window. The shared h1 through h6 rule misspells the family as "Monserrat" and quietly falls back to sans-serif, which is why only the per-element rules render in Montserrat at all.

The logo is where the palette opens up. Two dark grey chevrons, #414042, are drawn as real paths rather than typed characters, and they wrap the letters d, i and v while "erse" runs on past the closing bracket. Each letter takes its own hue: d red #BE1E2D, i green #39B54A, v navy #2B3990, e cyan #00AEEF, r magenta #EE2A7B, s yellow #F9ED32, final e black. A low-poly origami butterfly perches above the opening bracket, five faceted greens in the lower wing and eight mixed hues in the upper. Twelve or more colors in a mark, set on a four-color page. Three variants shipped: the vector master, a 300 by 156 raster, and a reversed cut with white letterforms on a thin green keyline for the green header bar. Two devices carry the identity onto the page. The hero is a duotone cut-out composite, all thirteen graduates knocked out of white and overlapped in one row, each tinted a different color, with green pins over the faces linking through to that person's page, so the class photo is the navigation. The second is a set of thirteen flat- vector illustrated scenes, one per graduate, every one clipped into the same hexagonal 45-degree-cut frame that echoes the brackets in the logo.

A designer with a laptop sits on a purple car roof under a smiling moon, palm leaves and a dog in a space helmet.
A surfer in pink rides a teal wave on a coral board under palm fronds and a coral sun, cut into an angled frame.
A figure in red rides a giant pencil across a stack of books, drawing a red swoosh, constellations strung behind.
A reader with a glowing book leans on a giant pink striped cat beside a teacup of tea full of stars, in navy and pink.

Development Process

How Diverse Was Built

Like every GDES Portfolio Show, the students planned and produced Diverse themselves, from the first idea to opening night.

1

Concept Pitched

A student pitched the concept that became this show's identity.

2

Concept Selected

Faculty and advisors selected the concept to represent the graduating class.

3

Show Produced

The class collaborated on branding, web design, marketing, and exhibition.

4

Work Presented

Student portfolios were presented to faculty, peers, and professionals.

Industry Judges & Advisors

Members of the GDES Technical Advisory Committee often participate as judges and mentors during the annual portfolio show. Meet the Advisory Committee →

Explore More

Browse all student work, view the full student directory, or schedule a visit to learn more about the program.