The plain white walls of the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are now adorned with a message to its graduates about the direction of their future. The scarlet script was designed by recent graduate Sydni Moran, and it helps the college with its ongoing beautification process to encapsulate 125 years of journalism education in the making.
Interim dean Amy Struthers said she believes graduates and alumni should be celebrated as well as anniversaries.
Struthers said she could think of no better person to reach out to than Moran, a 2017 graduate, whose design business SydMo Creative Co. specializes in hand lettering and prints. Moran wrote send-off wishes to graduating students this spring while the college reached a milestone birthday.
Struthers and her staff found the image so inspiring that they began to brainstorm ideas of where else the art should go. Moran said when she sold the rights for the college to use the Nebraska illustration poem, the college’s staff mentioned it could wind up in a few different places, but she was elated when she saw her work find its way onto the back of the college’s magazine insert, T-shirts for alumni, framed in Struthers’s office and plastered on a lobby wall inside Andersen Hall.
“I’ve never seen my work that large, so it was wild and surreal to see updates of it going up,” Moran said. “[I am] really honored, truly.”
“[The wraps are] partly celebration and partly ‘let’s get our building looking brighter, fresher, cleaner, newer and more modern. I think it’s better with the wraps … [they] really show off what we do here because we’re certainly digital,” Struthers added.
Moran’s words are memorialized in Andersen Hall as part of a perfect summary of everything the school has strived to embody over the last 125 years.
“May we use our voices boldly and our freedoms of speech wisely,” Moran’s poem reads. “May we rejoice in our growth and be enthralled by the future. Let us celebrate those who paved a path and let us put up lanterns for those to follow. Our words are vessels: ones that have the ability to share moments of good and moments of sorrow. For 125 years, we have found value and beauty in telling an important story, but telling it with integrity is what deems the deepest of glory.”
