UCLA Housing & Hospitality (H&H) and UCLA Residential Life recently earned several honors from the Association of College and University Housing Officers – International (ACUHO-I). The annual awards recognize well-designed and innovative media for residence life and housing operations and celebrate the work of the association’s 950 member organizations, which hail from six continents.
Plateia: The Cookbook, which was produced in-house by the H&H marketing and communications team, took top spot in the “Specialty Items/ Other” category and was named overall “Best in Show.” Released in 2020, the book was written by Plateia’s Executive Chef Jason Tingley and Chef de Cuisine Jeromy Sung, with Rebecca Kendall, editorial and communications manager, contributing stories from the restaurant and a look at how the restaurant contributes to the culture and mission of UCLA.
The project was managed by Magyn Kydd, creative director, and designed by Michael Ries, senior designer, with photography support provided by Felicia Caldwell, photographer and special projects specialist.
In 2020, the 240-page cookbook, which is available at Plateia, the Luskin Conference Center and Hotel, and the UCLA Store and on the store’s website, was honored by the International Association of Conference Centers with its 2020 Global Innovation Award for creativity, innovation and impact.
In addition, the branding for Bruin Bowl, one of UCLA’s newest grab-and-go restaurants for residential students, earned second place in the “Logo/Mark/Icon” category. Created by Ivy McNally, senior graphic designer, the branding lends itself to the restaurant’s rotating weekly menu of pan-Asian, pan-Mediterranean, Indian and Latin selections by featuring different logo colors that are used on the menus and staff uniforms to communicate the culinary theme of each week. The branding also incorporates a circular pattern that denotes the restaurant’s bowl concept and a map overlay, decorative accent pieces and digital screens in the restaurant’s interior design that evoke a sense of culinary adventure and exploration that adds to the guest experience. The concept is further amplified with its “Customizable Bowls for Intrepid Diners” tagline.
Rounding out the UCLA wins, UCLA Residential Life earned third place in the “Overall Campaign” category, for its “Academics on the Hill” program, a digital postcard series that aimed to connect new students with the UCLA campus during the COVID-19 pandemic while highlighting student artists. The department’s media team student illustrator Lauren Cramer, then a third-year design and media arts major, rose to the challenge by leveraging her background in fine arts, illustration and 2D realism to create a series of six postcards that featured some of UCLA’s most iconic locations, including Royce Hall, the inverted fountain and the Powell Library, along with a scene of the walkway that ascends the hill toward Shapiro Fountain.
This project has since set the tone for subsequent work coming out of the design group of the media team, which has created other pieces that fuse 3D and 2D illustrations with pastel earth tones. The postcard images have also been used in coloring pages, desktop backgrounds, zoom backgrounds and cover art for Residential Life videos on YouTube. Collectively, the art from this project has reached some 20,500 followers on social media, and has been viewed by visitors to the Student Affairs Guidebook website.
