When Tiffany Soohoo glances out a window of the Warehouse in September, she’ll see what started as a class project with fellow sophomore Karina Campos, blown up to enormous proportions on the Connective Corridor billboard. The two won a recent design competition, and will see their work displayed in early September.

“It’s going to be really cool to see,” said Soohoo, an industrial and interaction design major.

As part of a visualization course, Soohoo said her class was charged with developing a design concept for the Connective Corridor billboard. Campos, also an industrial and interaction design major, said she and Soohoo, who knew each other since their freshman year, decided to be partners.

“We’re both really into typography, and never did anything to that scale before,” Soohoo said. “We didn’t have to submit our design, but we did.”

The design the duo submitted was a nine-month series of billboards branded “We Are Syracuse.” The phrase will be emblazoned on the Connective Corridor billboard for the new academic year, starting in September.

Quinton Fletchall, the Connective Corridor project coordinator for Syracuse University’s Office of Community Engagement and Economic Development, knows how tough it is to capture glances of passers-by on the corner of West Fayette and West; especially, Fletchall said, since drivers rambling past the billboard aren’t likely to pay much attention. Their attention is more than likely on the road instead.

“It’s no easy task,” said Fletchall. “It’s something I struggled with. A billboard is a long but short image.”

Fletchall said he took on the challenge of designing the Connective Corridor’s billboard himself — the current “Dear Syracuse, With Love” series, featuring a monthly love letter to the Salt City, was his brainchild — before deciding to open it up to competition.

The focus on individual stories, Fletchall said, made Campos and Soohoo’s design a front running contender.

“They were among three or four finalists,” Fletchall said. “I wasn’t a judge, but I listened in on it. They won for going out there and capturing the average person from Syracuse.”

Since finding out they’d be designing nine months of Connective Corridor billboards in late February, Soohoo and Campos buckled down for planning. Soohoo said she knows a lot of students who have never forayed into downtown Syracuse. Through the project, she said she was reminded about how much the Connective Corridor does to bridge the campus and city.

Their overarching design was based on having Syracuse residents and students spell out the monthly theme (September, the first month their designs will go up, reads “Passion”) by holding up individual letters. Soohoo and Campos spent a long time deliberating on words that summed up their mission statement.

“It was easy to narrow down words, since we had a certain number of letters we had to use, because of the space of the billboard,” Campos said. “But even when we had that list, it was hard to pick from still.”

The concept of the themes, Soohoo said, was to start simple before ending the project’s nine-month span by spelling out “Syracuse.”

“We’re really big on not only getting SU students. We thought it was the easy way out,” she said. “We’ve contacted people in the community, and we want to feature who’s making a difference — people who are passionate and have stories to tell.”

Fletchall said Campos and Soohoo’s first two designs will be ready to go by the end of the semester. Between calling movers and shakers in the Syracuse community and scheduling interviews with local residents, Soohoo said the project has almost been like a part-time job.

But both students have also found their experiences breaching the SU bubble and hitting the city streets have helped kindle their passion for the project.

“I was a little shy at first,” Campos said. “But everyone has been really open to talking with us, even if it’s randomly on the street. We really want this to be embedded in the city.”

It’s that kind of drive Fletchall admires in Campos and Soohoo — he said the duo’s eagerness has made helping them through the design process exciting.

“They’re bringing a lot of energy into the process,” he said. “I ran into Karina on the street a few days ago, and she talked all about how the planning is going and they’re both completely on top of it.”

Fletchall also echoed the duo’s sentiments about the cool-but-unusual feeling of seeing their work stretched over a canvas as big as the Connective Corridor billboard.

“Work is typically featured in class,” he said, “But having it on public display with your name attached is an amazing feeling.”

Like Soohoo, Campos will be a junior when she gets to see her work get unveiled. But she said that getting to work on a project of this scope as a second-year student was an experience in and of itself.

Said Campos: “It’s surreal.”

Published on April 15, 2014 at 1:00 am

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman