I volunteered for a charitable, annual event from July 2015 to June 2024. Anime Twin Cities is a fundraising organization that holds events throughout the year to raise money to donate to charities. The big event that raises the most money is a three day convention called Anime Detour. I worked in the Themes Department where I have created event signage, like 6' tall banners. I have also helped with social media banners and images for special posts. Most notably, I took on the responsibility of creating the program book which is 68-72 pages long. I have created art for the inside pages, created logos, designed ads for sponsors, touched-up photos and organized the content with my skills in layout. The program book is what I am most proud of in my volunteering with Anime Detour.

Anime Detour is an annual event and I assisted in publishing the seventy-two page guidebook. The program guide is filled with information about the convention such as; rules, panels, special guests and highlights. I used Adobe InDesign for the guide, incorporated Adobe Illustrator for maps of the hotel and touched-up guest photos in Adobe Photoshop. The cover and back are four color and the inside is grayscale. This was a huge project where I handled communications with other departments, kept the deadline and prepped the guide for the printer. I designed the "Detour to the Dark Side" (English and Japanese) and the "Thank you for 20 years" logos. *Cover image by Dian H.

At Anime Detour; a three day convention, there are different areas for attendees to visit. To make these locations easier to find I created tall banners that are easy to see. The character was previously created in Adobe Photoshop by another artist. I traced the character in Adobe Illustrator to make her vector. Once the character was now vector I added her to the large banner format. I have used the same font for all the banners to keep them consistent. I added small details to make the banners more fun and noticeable.

Anime Detour keeps in touch with attendees via social media. I am honored to say that I have helped with some of these posts. The top image is a banner that was created for the 2023 convention. I used characters that were drawn by Dian H. that represent Team Rocket from the Pokémon series and video games. I designed the "Detour to the Dark Side" logo, set the typography, created the background and designed the layout.

The bottom images were used as posts for Anime Detour's various social medias. The "Early Bird Registration" was used to urge attendees to get the best price possible for Anime Detour badges. I illustrated everything in the image, created the "Glow Up" logo and designed the layout. The second post is thanking the 8,142 attendees that came to visit Anime Detour in 2023. I emphasized the "8,142" since that was a record number of people that came. I also added the cat mascot since the exec team at that time was putting more emphasis on this character for diversity reasons.

The Anime Detour convention had been canceled two weeks before it was supposed to happen in 2020. Unfortunately,  our staff had already ordered t-shirts with the 2020 year in the art. To reduce waste, I was asked by the merchandise department to create a patch that attendees could iron on to the 2020 shirt with the year 2022. These are the options that I gave. The triple triangle patch was chosen since it incorporated the t-shirt’s triple triangle design. I designed these in Adobe Illustrator.