Role: Faculty Mentor & Creative Director
Years: 2026
Scope: Brand identity and website redesign for a volunteer-run nonprofit
Designer: Claire Durham (senior capstone)
Reach: UDCA’s members, donors, and event community across greater North Philadelphia
Client: Upper Dublin Chinese Association
Link: udca – prototype site

OVERVIEW
This project extends my ongoing design partnership with the Upper Dublin Chinese Association into a pedagogical engagement: I served as Faculty Mentor and Creative Director on Claire Durham’s senior capstone, which she designed and developed for the organization across one semester. I introduced Claire to UDCA’s board, led joint creative direction meetings to align her work with the organization’s needs around donation, event recaps, and accessibility for non-coders, and supervised the project through completion. Claire designed and built the rebrand’s visual identity, website, content strategy, while I served as the design and client-relationship layer behind the work. I am now stewarding the site’s transition to live production and maintaining it on UDCA’s behalf. The project models a pedagogical practice I find generative: extending a faculty member’s own community partnerships into mentored client engagements, where senior students take on real design responsibility while a faculty mentor holds the client relationship, creative direction, and long-term continuity.

MENTORSHIP & CREATIVE DIRECTION
My role centered on holding the space between a student’s learning and a client’s needs. I began by introducing Claire to UDCA’s board and facilitating a series of discovery conversations where the organization articulated what it needed: clearer pathways to donation, a way to surface event recaps without ongoing developer support, and a cohesive identity that reflected who they are. I translated those conversations into creative direction Claire could design against, then ran iterative review cycles where her design decisions were tested against both client expectations and professional standards. Throughout, I worked to keep Claire as the project’s designer rather than stepping in as one by directing, questioning, and editing.

DESIGN & BUILD APPROACH
The rebrand Claire designed gives UDCA a cohesive visual identity with logo system, typography, and color that honors the organization’s cultural specificity while reading as contemporary and confident. The website was designed around the board’s two priorities: donation and event recaps. To make the site sustainable for a volunteer-run organization with no developer on staff, we integrated it with Blogger and pulled event recaps directly from an RSS feed, meaning board members can publish updates through a familiar, no-code interface and have them appear automatically on the site. This was the key technical move of the project: it solved the maintainability problem at the structural level rather than asking the client to learn unfamiliar tools. Claire led the design and build; I contributed to portions of the implementation and held the overall direction. I am now stewarding the site’s transition to live production and maintaining it on UDCA’s behalf during the handoff period.