Vocational-Technical students help give Evans City welcome
EVANS CITY — Students at Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School are going from zombies to aliens.
In 2024, Evans City approached students in the school’s graphic design program to create images for new signs to be placed at entrance points in the borough. While students researched the borough’s history for design inspiration, borough council members said visitors could not be welcomed without a reference to a famous piece of its history, being the setting for “Night of the Living Dead.”
“They had to do research on the area, did a lot of history research to see what they wanted to incorporate into the signs,” said Lee Ann Clutter, graphic design instructor at the vocational-technical school. “Evans City changed the sign a bit because they wanted to incorporate all the zombies. They added zombies to each one.”
In January, Evans City installed one of the student-designed signs at the entrance to the borough on Route 68. What used to be a wooden plank with black lettering featuring a sculpture of an oil rig has been replaced by a colorful sign bearing a train with smoke billowing out of its smokestack.
The school’s graphic design students designed three welcome signs for the borough, which they presented to council last year. Evans City Councilwoman Cheri Deener-Kohan said the council liked all three so much that they couldn’t decide on just one. While only one has been produced so far, the other two designs will eventually be placed on the other end of Route 68 and at the borough entrance on Mars-Evans City Road.
“They did wonderful jobs of describing their work, and that's what I was looking for,” Deener-Kohan said.
The other two signs are will be a little smaller than the westernmost sign, but Deener-Kohan said they each feature different elements of the borough’s history, including oil, rolling hills, Breakneck Creek, Native American tipis and, of course, zombies.
The borough is paying for the signs one at a time, but Deener-Kohan said it was about time to replace the old signs.
“The other signs are 45, 50 years old, the ones that we had made for the 200th anniversary of the U.S.,” Deener-Kohan said. “We have people coming here from Europe to see this town, which is amazing to me.
“It's really pretty,” Deener-Kohan added. “It should brighten us up over here.”
Clutter said the sign designs made waves not only with Evans City council, but at the annual SkillsUSA competition, where the graphic design team took first place in the state competition, and did well at the national competition in June in Atlanta.
Graphic design students Bethany Scuticchio, Madison Smith and Zoe Coffey went on to win first place at the SkillsUSA Pennsylvania State Leadership Conference in Hershey on April 5, 2024. Competing in the Career Pathways Showcase – Art and Communication, the Evans City team placed fourth in the nation at that year’s national competition.
Students had to detail the choices behind their design and had to discuss the production of their sign. They also had to “itemize how much it was going to cost to build and everything,” Clutter said.
All this information was compiled on a poster board that the students present at the SkillsUSA competition.
After being lauded for their work on the Evans City signs, graphic design students at the vocational-technical school have been tapped by Mars officials to make new welcome signs for their borough as well.
Charlie Dillaman, a senior at the Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School, is part of the team that designed signs for Mars. The students each utilized the flying saucer as a main element of their designs, and after spending many class sessions and even late nights working on the Mars sign, Charlie said the designers’ final selection was an amalgamation of all their ideas.
“It has been really fun to be able to express your creative chops in this way,” Charlie said. “You make friends with people you work on projects with, you hang out for days at a time.
“We became quite the team.”
The designers presented their signs to Mars council last year, which was a little intimidating to the students, who were entering new territory by speaking to public officials at a meeting. Charlie said the council members were a good audience.
“They were very nice, they were very receptive to what we were saying,” Charlie said. “There was obviously a little bit of jitters. Other than talking kind of fast I think I did pretty good.”
Presenting their design at the SkillsUSA competition was “definitely more stressful,” Charlie said. However, it was also rewarding to compete at a national event that was attended by the top designers from schools around the country.
“You have to wait a few hours to go, but the judges were really nice,” Charlie said. “We met a lot of new people, made new friends. It was really nice, it was worth doing.”
Clutter said the Mars signs may take a while to be installed in the borough, but the signs might be printed by the graphic design program itself, since they will be smaller than the Evans City signs.
Printing signs and designs is part of what students in the graphic design program at the vocational-technical school learn, according to Clutter.
“They design it on the computer on Adobe Illustrator, then they break it into layers, print it and then apply it to foam corner,” she said.
With this professional experience under their belts, Clutter said she and her students would be happy to create designs for more municipalities should they need a new visual identity. It might be hard for any other Butler County municipalities to surpass the unique theming of Evans City and Mars, though, but even Charlie said the students would be up for the challenge.
“It's a fun project because of the subject matter too, space and zombies,” Clutter said. “Plus, it's a great project for their portfolio.”
