Cheap & easy

There were two major issues, budget and hand-off. When I spoke to the event coordinators about the conference, I learned that every year they re-branded the conference theme and spent thousands of dollars on promotional products and signage.

On the hand-of portion of the project, I was in charge of creating brand standards to hand off to a production company to create stage graphics and PPT templates.

Reduce, reuse & hand-hold?

To solve the budget issues, I decided to create a cascading branding system, using extractable elements that could be updated and used year after year to reduce design and production costs by thousands of dollars per year.

Hand-off ended up being a lot more art direction with the production company. Marketing leadership at Travel Leaders were not happy with their work, so I stepped in to help them get the design where it needed to be.

Modular Style Guide? Cascading Brand System…whatever you want to call it

Rather than a new style every year, that would result in reprints of banners, directional signage, full website overhaul, swag reorders, I decided to make a semi-permanent brand that had modular elements to it. The logo mark (EDGE) itself, would always remain the same, but in most cases, it would accompanied by silhouettes of famous landmarks from the host city. In addition, the color palette would take on characteristics from the area. 2018 was held in Las Vegas, so the logo included the skyline, along with a bright neon pink and purple color palette. Some printed elements were kept location agnostic in order to be able to reuse them.

The following years were updated with a new skyline, and similar color palettes, so even if old elements were reused, they would still look consistent.