Branding a Fundraising Journey
Yellow Tours of Texas (Academic Project), Austin, TX - 2010
The Challenge
Design a complete, believable brand and narrative identity for a fictional fundraising company and event – built to the standard of a real corporate proposal, using the actual colors and fonts of LIVESTRONG.
The Approach
The concept itself. "Tour de Texas" was designed as four distinct multi-day motor-coach tours through Central Texas tying together each regions unique culinary, cultural, and historic sites – patterned deliberately after the Tour de France's stage format – as a charity fundraiser for LIVESTRONG. It's a plan I still think would actually work, if anyone ever ran it.
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A name that does double duty. "Yellow Tours of Texas" – a play on both "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and LIVESTRONG's signature yellow – set the tone before a reader got past the cover.
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Borrowing a world that already means something. Rather than inventing tour language from scratch, I pulled the vocabulary of the Tour de France – routes became "pelotons," stops became "stages," the event ended at a "finish line" – giving supporters of a cancer charity a ready-made frame of endurance and shared journey.
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Four routes, four distinct personalities. Each proposed route told its own story through its stops: a Southern BBQ trail through Driftwood, Lockhart, and a Shiner Bock brewery tour; a Hill Country wine route through Fredericksburg and Marble Falls; a "Country Cookin'" route through Brenham and Salado; and a one-day Austin street food tour hitting local favorites like Gourdoughs and Torchy's. Every stage honored a specific meal, town, or landmark.
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Consistency as credibility. Every touchpoint – proposal binders, fonts, layout – carried LIVESTRONG's actual brand identity throughout. My bar was simple: would this be good enough to actually bring to LIVESTRONG's board? Nothing shipped that didn't clear it.
The project's professor called it "superb," writing that the team had "truly raised the bar for future classes" – from the binders' look and feel to the depth of research behind the content. Fifteen years later, UT Austin's program still uses our final presentation as an example of best-in-class work. Having sat in on our practice sessions and seen the standard I held our presentation to, the professor later asked me to be a guest speaker in the class's public-speaking session.
