Andrew Rossi
Leading the relaunch of the American Institute of Graphic Artists’ website for the Kansas City chapter.
Design System
Development
UI/UX
Web
For 35 years, AIGA Kansas City has been a home for the local creative community, producing hundreds of campaigns, events, and programs, each with its own look shaped by whoever was behind it. That creative freedom is one of the chapter's best qualities, and it's exactly what this brand system is built to protect. It isn't a set of restrictions; it's a shared visual language, a small set of constants that make everything AIGA KC produces feel connected without making it feel the same. Everything else is left to the designer.
The system is grounded in a clear strategy. The mission is to connect, support, and celebrate the Kansas City design community, creating spaces where designers at every stage can learn from each other, find opportunities, and grow. The audience is broad by design, working designers, students, and anyone in the city who believes creativity matters, united by curiosity. The position is just as distinct: one of the most active and accessible chapters in the AIGA network, a working community rather than an exclusive club.
Everything in the system hangs on four anchors. Borrowing from print production, where registration marks keep every layer aligned, Color, Type, Craft, and the Mark act as the fixed reference points that keep AIGA KC's identity in register no matter how much the creative shifts around them.
The base palette is intentionally broad: six core colors, magenta, black, white, blue, yellow, and green, each with a full 11-step shade scale from lightest to darkest. It's built to cover every practical need, from high-contrast pairings for type to subtle tints for backgrounds and bold, saturated values for accents.
The type system runs on two variable fonts, Roboto Flex and Fraunces. Rather than a handful of fixed weights, designers dial in exactly what they need along continuous axes for weight, width, and optical size. Roboto Flex handles the functional work, headlines, UI, captions, and event details, while Fraunces brings editorial warmth that can shift from refined body text to expressive display. Together they give the chapter a voice that can be precise in one campaign and loose and inviting in the next.
The logo pairs the national AIGA mark with a confident KC, set shoulder to shoulder rather than tucked underneath, so the chapter carries the recognition of the national organization while asserting its own identity. The AIGA eye, a long-standing symbol of how designers observe and interpret, becomes a living element beyond the logo: a motif that scatters across backgrounds, animates to track and follow, and renders through the system's print-inspired textures, halftones, hairline rules, and overprint layering that give even digital work a tactile, made quality.
AIGA KC's work has evolved constantly over 35 years, and the system is designed to keep it moving rather than freeze it in place. The aim is to hand every future designer a set of constants to start from, so the work can keep evolving without losing the thread of what makes it AIGA KC. It comes together in a three-step workflow: Theme, Generate, and Create.
To put the system in everyone's hands, not just designers, I built a custom brand tool. Its Palette Engine generates a color palette that stays harmonious with the brand magenta while tuned to each campaign, and the canvas generator turns the brand's anchors and that new palette into backgrounds, textures, and animated assets, exported and ready to use in seconds.
With the tools in place, the system shows up consistently everywhere the chapter publishes, from LinkedIn and social posts to event collateral like the A30 Awards program and Portfolio Day. Every piece reads unmistakably as AIGA KC while still leaving its designer room to make it their own.
The same constants scale up to large-format and environmental work, campaign posters, street displays, and printed pieces, holding together just as well at six feet as they do on a phone screen.
