This highly successful campaign helped the AIGA to increase its membership –in only one year– from 15,000 to 22,500 members.

To promote membership inAIGA, Alfalfa Studio envisioned a campaign that would abandon a sterilecorporate façade. In its place, we built a vision of AIGA from theinside: organic, connected, pulsing communities of designers at local andnational levels. The living tissue of community is the central idea: anorganism, rather than an organization.

Alfalfa Studio took stylistic inspiration from the works of outsider artists. The “obsessive” hand-drawn detail ofhis poster pays homage to individual personality and craftsmanship, andcelebrates the connective power of imagination. Working by hand helps deliver the idea of each AIGA member as an individual talentcontributing to the vitality of the whole.

Theformal content in the poster (the central piece of the campaign) is the fullinformation about AIGA: its mission, programs, events, resources, chapters, andmedalists from 1920 through 2006. But there is a second, informal layer ofcontent as well. Regional colloquialisms submitted by over 100 national andinternational members of AIGA give this designing organism its voice. Also,each chapter is paired with a song lyric celebrating its city or region, bymusicians ranging from
Johnny Cash to KISS to TheCarpenters.

All these details arepulled together through their contrast with the 3-D red metallic ribbon at thecenter of the poster. With its generous curves, it hangs like a doorknockerextending its welcome: Join Us.

Thecampaign included nearly a dozen pieces, from the central poster/capabilitiesbrochure, to reminder postcards, an application card, an application brochure,and stickers.