LIS Marketing Coordinator Ashley Horn, Dr. Tracy Rutledge, LIS President Patrick Smith, and Marketing and Communications intern Martha Jane Hooper, left to right, after meeting with MMSC students in Rutledge’s Advanced Media Design class about the logo design. | Photo credit / LIS
UT Martin Mass Media and Strategic Communication students are working to develop a new logo for L.I. Smith & Associates, a land surveying and civil engineering company, to commemorate their upcoming 50th anniversary.
LIS was established in 1975 as a family business in Paris, Tennessee, that provided surveying services for the state. In the last 50 years, the company has experienced significant growth and has grown into a civil engineer and surveying corporation that covers 12 states with a staff that has doubled in the last 10 years alone to keep up with the high demand.
The company has connections with the MMSC department through LIS’s Marketing Coordinator Ashley Horn, who graduated from the program with a bachelor’s and master’s degree, and their Marketing and Communications intern Martha Jane Hooper, who is a MMSC major with a focus in Strategic Communication and Public Relations.
“We enjoy partnering with the Department of Mass Media and Strategic Communications whenever we get the chance. The MMSC students are extremely talented, reliable, and contribute unique, innovative ideas,” Horn says.
LIS President Patrick Smith and Ashley Horn met with MMSC students from Dr. Tracy Rutledge’s Advanced Media Design class in March to discuss the company’s brand objectives, mission, and values. The class has been split into groups, and each group will work throughout the semester on developing a primary and secondary logo for the company based on these objectives.
“This is a great opportunity for students to understand how the real world works and see that there are opportunities outside of traditional mass communication areas, such as working with a surveying and civil engineering firm. It also helps our students network and see where designers can plug into other industries,” Rutledge says.
The groups are currently in the rough draft part of designing the logo, and each group will pitch their design and the reasoning behind their design to LIS during finals week. After the presentation, one group’s design will be chosen, and it will be LIS’ new logo that will be used throughout 2025 to commemorate its 50th anniversary.
Kaylee Michon, one of the students from the class, says that the best part of working on this assignment is the creative freedom she gets to have.
“I really feel that this is a great opportunity to learn about my natural design aesthetic and how to orient that into real-world scenarios and working with a professional company,” Michon says.
Sarah Cornwell, another student from the class, says that she enjoys seeing all the different designs that the class is coming up with and how even though they were all given the same prompt, the designs are very different from person to person. The hardest part of the assignment for her though was having to put all the research together in a research report where they had to list the reasoning behind the design.
“It challenged all of us to get a better understanding of logo design and to have a way to back up every design decision we made,” Cornwell says.
After choosing a design, LIS will launch the new commemorative logo when it meets its 50-year milestone in January 2025.
More information about LIS and this partnership along with any updates on the logo can be found at www.lismith.com.
