News

The Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon, which draws around 15,000 participants and tens of thousands of visitors from around the world, called on The Cleveland Institute of Art to collaborate on the designs for this year’s race. Four talented second-year graphic design students, Ryan Camp, Sasha Thueringer, Andrew Frank, and Liz Bermea, were selected to design participant shirts by Communication Design Department Head Mari Hulick.

“They came to us for a new design of the t-shirts for the 5K, 10K, half, or full marathon,” said Camp. “We had to revamp their old design, which was very Jimi Hendrix–inspired, and gear it more toward our generation, freshen it up a little bit.”

Executive Race Director Jack Staph and his team liked the designs so much, they incorporated them into the merchandise as well. “The students presented a whole new design that was hip and fresh, without compromising the integrity of the campaign style,” said Staph. “The concepts they designed were clever and surprising and I’d like to work with CIA design students on more of our collateral next year.” The extended collaboration could include an art walk around the course race.

The final three designs were inspired by the race’s tagline “The Cleveland Experience.” The students used inspirational words as graphics, such as a guitar and a flowing design that runs over the shoulder. In the third, bold letters that read “RUN CLE” mimic the famous Run DMC shirts. Mari Hulick and her students had some initial meetings for direction on beginning the process and the students took it from there.

“It was really cool to work on this with four team members,” said Camp. “We started off working alone on designs and then brought our concepts together as a group. This wasn’t required; we’d just meet and say ‘this is what I came up with last night, have you come up with anything new?’ We would compare designs. Sasha and I would even trade computers and work on each other’s designs, just to get the kinks out. That worked well. It was definitely a cool thing, taking each other’s advice and modifying designs so we could agree that they reached the target audience.”

Check out the designs on our Flickr site or go to the race to see them in person. Visit the Cleveland Marathon site to learn more about the upcoming race and to buy the student-designed merchandise. Or learn more about the communication design (graphic design) program at CIA.