LSU’s creative services had their hands full on National Signing Day.
The team released hundreds of designs that welcomed the 23-member signing class.
Each football signee had his own player card design that was posted on billboards, social media sites and a custom built web page for signing day. The designs displayed the signees name, hometown, position and ranking.
Each signee had three different sizes of billboard designs that were placed in each signees’ hometown. Jason Feirman, executive director of LSU creative services, said LSU posted over 100 billboards in eight different states.
“There were 112 billboards,” Feirman said. “And we started running some of the early enrollees’ [designs] before signing day to get our name out there.”
Feirman began working for LSU in 2000 and has worked for creative services for 13 years. He is an alumnus of LSU.
This year, Feirman said his team created four different teaser campaigns.
The teaser campaigns were designed to be a hype video for signing day, but specifically targeted the incoming signees.
“We call it our signing day vows,” Feirman said. “We just tried to look at it a different way. This is the beginning step of [the signees] becoming alumni and now [they are] joining us. When we thought about it we were just thinking, ‘What can we do for fun?’ and that’s what we came up with.”
Feirman explained the response from the players about the teaser campaigns were positive.
“If they are retweeting us, then that’s great,” Feirman said.
In addition to the teaser campaigns, LSU’s creative services team launched a web page specifically for National Signing Day.
The web page displayed the behind-the-scenes action and celebrations like Bayou Bash of signing day.
“We wrote captions to what was happening that day,” Feirman said about the web page photos. “We ran and updated this throughout the day. We wanted our fans to be involved as much as possible.”
The designs and ideas come from multiple employees within the LSU creative services department.
“It’s a group effort between our marketing staff, communications department and our video group,” Feirman said. “We work in sequence together to make sure we celebrate signing day and what it is.”
LSU creative services began the National Signing Day designs nearly a decade ago.
“Social media really started the use of LSU starting National Signing Day designs,” Feirman said. “We started around 2007, and it took off from there.”
In addition to National Signing Day designs, the LSU creative services department is also in charge of the logo and yearly designs.
“We wanted to showcase our student-athletes, competition and coaches,” Feirman said about the ‘All for LSU’ slogan.
“‘All for LSU’ was everyone’s idea,” Feirman said. “It was a nonstop process but we presented it to the teams and to the staff and we went from there. All it is, is about giving your all together as a group and giving in effort to go all out.”
The campaign took several months to create and complete before being used in August of 2016.
“If we have a message, then that’s what we are here for,” Feirman said. “We are here to give that message out visually.”