This story is part of Georgetown Faces, a storytelling series that celebrates the beloved figures, unsung heroes and dedicated Hoyas who make our campus special.
John LaRue’s fingerprints are all over Georgetown’s campus. The art director for the Office of Strategic Communications designs blue-and-gray banners on buildings, signage in hallways, shiny programs and brochures at events.
Design is his forte. But he found his craft through an unexpected source: baseball.
The art director cut his teeth with Indiana’s DuBois County Dragons, a former minor league team where A League of Their Own was filmed. He began managing media relations for minor league teams across the Midwest, with one-year stints in Madison, Wisconsin; Duluth, Minnesota; and Sioux City, Iowa.
Back then, LaRue had his sights set on player development. But along the way, in the midst of writing press releases and media notes, he was asked to design the game programs. He found he liked it.
“I wasn’t good at it, but I took to it,” he said. “[The job] gave me a chance to realize how people were consuming information and finding ways to make it look better in a way that was easier to consume.”
LaRue knew design could be a career path and honed his skills for an advertising company, writing and designing the labels stapled to prescriptions, and then for Washington University in St. Louis. In 2017, he started as a graphic designer for Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
LaRue is now the art director for the Office of Communications, where he oversees graphic design for the office and other departments across the university. He works closely with the university’s Visual Identity team, which sets the brand and visual identity standards for Georgetown. On any given day, LaRue designs digital graphics and social cards for commencement, annual reports and booklets for a school, and fields logo requests.
Over the years, he’s found he has an eye for design, even if he wasn’t traditionally trained.
“I don’t have a traditional design background,” he said. “But through hard work and great mentorship, I ended up here.”
Learn more about how baseball inspired LaRue, the work he’s proudest of at Georgetown and the little book he made inspired by his dog, Tito.
Sports got me drawing: When I was a kid, I loved sports logos. I would read these preseason preview magazines, and I was like, wouldn’t it be cool to make my own? So I would write an 8-year-old’s version of sports journalism and then draw the accompanying logos. The drawings weren’t necessarily good, but I could do the Miami Dolphins fairly well. When I found out that there were actual jobs in professional sports in the middle of college, I realized that it could be a career.
What I saw my first day in the Office of Communications: I was sitting at my desk, getting acclimated. And Jack the Bulldog was in the office being trained to ride a skateboard. He would occasionally look over at me like, ‘Hey, this is my new life.’ That’s when I knew that I’d found my place. It’s a great combination of whimsy and college spirit.
What I’m proudest of: Our public health campaign during the pandemic. It was more than just design. It had a clear altruistic end of encouraging public health, keeping people safe. It was rewarding because so many people informed the direction of where it went. It was one of the more seamless team efforts I’ve ever had where the messaging and design were crafted very specifically.
We also worked to have it stand out from everything else we’d ever done. We had our brand and adhere to [certain] colors, fonts, etc., but this had to be different. We didn’t want it to become white noise on campus. … [It felt like] this is what I can do to make our entire community healthier. I’m very proud of that.
What I wish people knew about me: I’m one piece of a larger visual identity group. The team includes athletics, advancement, university information services and other representatives who help shape a lot of the university-wide initiatives. I’m not the logo police; rather, there’s a team of us [laughs]. We all collaborate.
To me, a logo is: What do people say about you when you’re not in the room? Or what do people say about you when you’re in the room? The logo is one expression of that. When you say ‘Georgetown,’ a lot of things come to mind. We want to make sure that [the logo] is as easily recognizable as possible. So that when our community uses it, they extract all the benefits that come from affiliation with the university.
When I see my designs on campus: I get a kick out of it. It’s like I’m putting clothes on the campus. I’m helping to make the campus more functional, give the university a look and feel. But I love that it’s also somewhat subtle. People know that’s Georgetown. It’s not screaming at people. It’s just who we are. It hits our authentic self.
If I was a font: Bilestone Script. Essentially, it’s a baseball font — a big, swoosh-y font with extra tails and special characters. Every letter looks like something you’d see on the front of a baseball jersey. We got to use it as a decorative font during the commencement where we were at Nats Park. I love baseball, and it’s the nexus of baseball and design. It is a good functional font, with appropriate character spacing and it can accommodate so many different things. It fits.
The post-pandemic hobby I picked up: I’ve been around people who are good cooks my whole life. My mother was a good cook. My father was a meat science major and worked in the poultry industry. My grandfather was a butcher. My wife is an amazing cook and so creative in the kitchen. That was always inspiring. When we moved into a house, I had room for a grill and for a smoker, and I just tried to recreate things I see on PBS [laughs]. When I grill, it’s like, what’s this turkey going to taste like if I inject it with cognac butter? It’s another extension of creativity. You’d be shocked what you can do on a grill.
Speaking of meat, my dog is: half Vienna sausage, half squirrel. He’s about 25 pounds. He is getting a little bit older. We have matching beards. It’s a sort of salt and pepper thing, although we’re both a little more salt these days than we’d like. We hit the jackpot with Tito. We got him at a rescue, and he gets along with everybody. He’s just a good guy to everyone.
Tito dreams of meat: I made a photo book of him a few years ago as a gift for my wife, with pages and pages of him staring at grilled meat. Its title was Tito Dreams of Meat. At some point, it became an art form to try to capture the perfect photo of his tiny little face staring intently at the food. It was a hilarious visual: This 25-pound dog and his big half-pug eyes peeking just above the table view with meat in the foreground. It’s one of the most fun projects I’ve ever designed.
What gets me out of bed in the morning: The people. It’s an entire campus full of people who are empathetic, kind, intelligent and hardworking. You don’t find that at regular jobs. You find these characteristics in everybody you interact with across departments and campuses. They also live the values. They take it seriously, which is not something you find everywhere.
