Last fall, one of my teachers ( slash mentor + friend ) asked me to be a part of a project her freelance collective had been hired to design. Little did I know how much I would learn over the next six months and how much I would come to realize the occasional beer really helps when you're working on big, complicated + transformative design work.

That project is the Impact Initiative, Madison College's Academic Plan for 2014 - 2017.

If there's one thing you take away from this post, it's this: the world is changing, and fast. It has huge potential for positive transformation within our academic institutions, and this report reflects how Madison College ( our area's technical school ) needs to adapt its programming in order to face these imminent changes. Did you know the majority of people in higher education are women? That HALF of all nurses will be at retirement age by 2020? That roughly 60% of jobs that will exist 10 years from now haven't been invented yet? These are big things.

Luckily, our problem as designers was not to solve these issues ( whew! ), but rather to highlight how Madison College is responding to them through a 100+ page report, posters and a super slick responsive website. In an age where, sadly, reading is become less important as attention spans wither, we chose to design heavily with infographics. Even if people don't read the full report, they will be able to understand the story through eye-catching illustrations, graphs and graphics.

With just four of us on the team, we worked crazy hard to finish this for its March launch. As a student, it was such an incredible learning experience—from project management to delegation to design to working with the client to learning about website design to experiencing first hand how a big project like this all comes together. It was a tough six months, but oh so worth it.

And I do highly encourage you to download the report as well as visit the website. No pressure, but a quick five-minute look won't hurt you. Because no matter who you are out there, our future workforce is changing and the results will affect all of us.

Okay, I just realized that sounded really doomsday-ish, but it's not. There are exciting things happening in this crazy world, so best to keep in the know. Then when all else fails, beer.