At the Learning Studio, we work to connect everyone on campus with the resources they need to be creative. This week, in partnership with our friends in the Maker Lab, we launched #MakeMerry on Facebook and Twitter. We enjoyed making Christmas cookies, hot chocolate, and pop tarts during Finals Week along with the opportunity to share some of our favorite Adobe projects from ACU students and faculty.

But the #MakeMerry promotion also reminded us of some of the passionate, inventive makers and storytellers we work with every day. This week we’ve been promoting Adobe tools we use year-round in our work making the library the creative hub of the ACU campus.

Here are just a couple of the ways that Adobe Creative Cloud makes our work possible.

Download Adobe CC software

Adobe CC Inspiration

#MakeMerry Branding, Nathan Driskell (Learning Studio Media Production Specialist)

Some of my most creative moments happen during the holidays. A change of pace is sometimes all it takes to connect the dots of a certain idea or discover a new way of doing things.” Nathan Driskell has been with the Learning Studio for most of our 5 years on campus and regularly leads video production projects, workshops for filmmakers, and most of the visual communications for us on the web, print, and social media. To produce the branding for the #MakeMerry promotion this year, Nathan developed original artwork in Illustrator that could be delivered to the web or digital signs as a still image. Then he also developed animations in After Effects that introduced simple motion to the branding elements to add a dash of holiday cheer to the videowall.  

Maker Lab Sign, Darren Wilson (Maker Lab Coordinator)

Darren Wilson joined the Maker Lab team this summer and led the design of the 6-foot tall box that welcomed visitors to the library this Homecoming. “We wanted to create some sort of mobile presence that would point people to the Maker Lab.” The project started life as a simple concept—a one-sided sign—but continued to evolve into a four-sided box you interact or play with. “I designed the inter-locking case in Illustrator and then gave those files to our student workers who in turn ran with it. Each side of the sign represents a different student worker and something they contributed.” In the future, individual panels can be replaced with new ones, meaning this is a project that will never be finished!