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Original "Greetings from Davis" specialty souvenir postcard design, hand-illustrated by the UC Davis Library's graphic designer Tim Silva
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Students writing postcards at tables in the lobby of UC Davis' Shields Library, while others peruse the exhibit, early in the postcard-writing activity in October 2024.
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The oversize mailbox begins to fill up with postcards during the student postcard-writing activity in October 2024. Cookies from a local bakery sweetened the experience.
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Students engaging with the community mosaic, which is nearly complete, during finals week in December 2024.
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The blank mosaic, showing how the full-color original concept was modified to create a student engagement activity.
Greetings from Davis
Category
Design > Illustrations
Description
Best of CASE District VII Award
Institution: University of California, Davis
Title of entry: Greetings from Davis
About this entry: As home of the university archives, one of the UC Davis Library’s roles is to be the steward and storyteller of campus and local history. In Fall 2024, the library’s communications team was tasked with designing a specialty souvenir postcard to build engagement around an exhibition of historic regional postcards.
The exhibit, “Greetings from Davis: Views from Local Postcards” (library.ucdavis.edu/exhibit/greetings-from-davis), featured over three dozen postcards from the library’s collections dating back to 1910. In addition to offering a visual history of the campus and surrounding city, the exhibition highlighted the role of postcards — from a time before smartphones and social media — as a way to send short messages and pictures of daily life. The team saw an opportunity to attract undergraduates and donors alike with an original design in the style of a vintage tourism postcard.
In addition to giving away 3,000+ souvenir postcards to exhibit visitors, the design became the cornerstone of a multi-faceted campaign including: a drop-in postcard-writing activity during which 400+ students wrote postcards home; a snowy “Season’s Greetings from Davis” version as a donor holiday card (print & electronic); and a collaborative community mosaic coloring activity during finals, in which another 150+ students participated.
Not only did the concept draw hundreds of visitors to the exhibit since its opening in October 2024, but it created excitement among 18-to-22 year-old students for an archival exhibit — and got them to write messages home by hand — neither of which are easy tasks!