McAfee

Role: Graphic Design, Visual Design

During my senior year of college, I was lucky enough to intern at McAfee doing graphic design for their Security Awareness & Training program. Throughout my time at the company, I made graphics and illustrations to be internally distributed to help remind employees of good cybersecurity hygiene practices, as well as contributing to a refresh of the program's SharePoint site. Below, I go into detail about how I approached designing a Halloween-themed poster. Check out the bottom of the page for more examples of my work at McAfee!

Research

For this poster, I was given a lot of creative freedom in that the only constraints were that the poster had to be Halloween themed, and it had to remind the viewer to be more security-aware in some way. To start off, I began researching Halloween posters, which led me to vintage horror movie posters. Once I settled on this concept, I also was heavily inspired by the stylistic minimalism of Saul Bass, who famously designed posters for movies such as The Shining and Anatomy of a Murder.

Concept Development

Anatomy of a Murder

poster by Saul Bass

Moving on to the concept development stage, I sat down with my manager to brainstorm the subject matter of the poster. We settled on the concept of a USB, and how it's not good security hygiene to plug in any sort of external device that you don't recognize or don't know the origin of into a computer. I then sketched out several options for a poster design, both involving a USB. My manager preferred the one with the zombie hand because she didn't like the way the splatter in the other design looked like blood.

One concept I came up with.

The second concept I came up with.

Creating the Design

Now I moved on to creating the design in Adobe Illustrator. I first created all the elements, then added texture using a mask. I also got feedback from my manager at this point that I should workshop the call to action to make it more memorable. We settled on "Even at home, only connect what you control" in reference to the fact that employees working from home should still be mindful of the devices they plug into company computers. Drawing inspiration from Saul Bass's use of colors, I choose a simple color palette of orange, white, and an off black.

My initial digital design.

Final Design & Lessons Learned

Although I liked the direction the design was headed, I still felt it needed something more. In the end, I added more texture to the orange background of the image as well as a white border around the design for a more vintage movie poster look. After I was done with the poster, my boss gave me a few final edits and then I formatted the file for print and sent it off to the brand team to approve it for distribution. My internship at McAfee was the first time I had to get approval from the brand department for one of my designs, and I learned a lot about how important it is to start early on a design that will have to go through multiple layers of approval. I also learned a lot about presenting my concepts and designs to a manager. Check out more of my work for McAfee below!

The final poster.