Design for Good: USF’s Food Pantry

In Fall 2024, Lizzy Fallon ’25 and Erika Baumgartner ’25, students in the Community Engaged Design class helped work on a large-scale campaign to rebrand and enhance the USF Food Pantry experience. Here is their story.

We had the privilege of working first hand on designing with and for the USF Food Pantry. Our class was split into four teams: branding, experience, promotion, and a food justice mural. Our collective goals were to create a brand and experience that is consistent and representative of the USF community. We worked with key stakeholders including on and off-campus students, students who knew or didn’t know about the pantry, and the faculty and staff involved in running the pantry. Before starting to work on rebranding the pantry, all teams collaborated on researching food insecurity and how it affects those in our local and external communities. We conducted interviews and made surveys for the stakeholders of the food pantry as a way to understand what the pantry means to the USF community. Without changing what the food pantry was built upon and using the responses from students and staff, we rebranded the food pantry to evoke joy, community, health, and food security. Our class also created new promotional materials and a food justice mural on campus.

Erika:

As part of the branding team, our responsibility was to create a unified brand that reflected the community and that could be used as a guide for the other groups to follow. After doing a lot of research and interviews, our group went through multiple rounds of creating a logo, landing on a choice that captures the love, community, and energy that fuels the pantry. We also picked a color scheme and set of typefaces that would be used in the “look” of the pantry. Each of us were also assigned to create assets that would be used throughout the pantry’s branding. We focused on themes of food security with produce and shelf-stable items, community, and education to guide us in our design process.

Using these assets and other branding aspects, we all created posters to advertise the food pantry. These are hung within the pantry and around school, and have general information for where the pantry is, pantry social media, and a QR code with additional information. This entire learning process was so rewarding as well as unique to my experience at USF. I’m usually the type of person to work alone on projects, so it was so refreshing and gratifying being able to work with such a positive class and professor. We were all able to give each other feedback and encourage each other to keep doing our best. I’ve learned so much about our USF community, and I’ve grown so much as an artist and as a team worker throughout the semester!

Lizzy:

Working on the experience team, I focused on how students interact with and use the food pantry to figure out how we can enhance their experiences. My team began with conducting surveys and in-person interviews, along with observing patrons using the food pantry. After reviewing the data we collected, our first task was to design number cards to replace the previous line system that was in place. Students reported that the line was always extremely long and prevented students from moving around the atrium and engaging with each other. Having patrons pull number cards upon their entry allows for the freedom to move around and hang out with fellow students. After this initial success for our team, our next steps were to refine the number cards and work on other signage to make the food pantry experience smoother.

We also got the opportunity to redecorate the inside of the pantry, adding colorful tablecloths, new signs, and sewn burlap sacks to cover the doors when the pantry is open. In most of my design classes, the work we do is mainly conceptual and based on our own tastes, so it was a really amazing experience to work with real clients and test our ideas each week. While my other design courses discuss how our work reflects accessibility, diversity, and culture, in this class, we got to see first-hand the impact our designs have on those around us. I am so glad I got to work closely with a once under-appreciated facet of the community and help shed light on such an important resource for students.