8:2 Conference Ideas

After looking at examples of conferences that already have established branding, I started to look at potential ideas for the Design for Change conference.

The first idea I thought of that could visually show behavioural change was through a cereal bowl because you can "consume" change. The bowl would be filled with things like clothes and phones and technology, things that we consume everyday that are constantly changing.

The second idea was like a split road and it was to convey the idea of choosing change.

However, ideas need to be tested to work and so I asked Emily what she thought and she didn't get either so it didn't work. I also realised it's meant to be a beneficial change whereas my idea just showed change.

I brainstormed again and made some moodboards to give me inspirations of things that could represent change and anything to give me visual inspiration for how the poster for the conference could look like, the type, the layout etc.

I like the idea of water and visually these two references stuck out to me. The left from the agency Jones Knowles Ritchie which visually represented melting plastic but I like the drip affect and the right from the agency Nonformat which uses a water droplet affect with the wobbly text and the reflections in the water which I thought was interesting.

I made some more moodboards to do with the idea of water this time and thought of the insight that ‘water is a metaphor for change’ as water has different states it can change to: liquid, solid, gas.

I looked at different ways I could show the flow of water through typography, the colours I could use and using the idea of reflection. I even took some time stuck in traffic to see the effect rain water has on my car.

I decided to make the first mockup of my potential poster. As it's the first mockup, I did it quite roughly with pictures to show what I meant for it to look like. So I wanted the text to be like dripping water, kinda like bubbles/droplets. And then used the idea of the droplet with the text inside so it becomes disproportionate. I also tested a potential layout for the poster.

I decided to develop the mockup further as I was going to be getting feedback from it so I didn't want to do the minimum and although I wasn't confident in my graphic skills, I decided to have a go at doing the typeface I wanted anyway to improve my skills and looked at some Youtube tutorials.

But none of these were really what I wanted so I looked around for typefaces that already existed and I was inspired by this type face I found online but you had to pay for it and it wasn't cheap so I figured I'd just smudge some of the letters to make new ones and colour it in.

I also realised it's very hard to paint 3D in colour so I decided to tackle that after I got feedback and to work on the text as a whole itself.

I added the water droplet affect on to the type face I wanted and just tried out different versions. I changed the background colour and the colour of the text to be more blue like water and sharpened the type a bit more.

I changed the colours around more and removed the colour from the type because I felt I was overdoing it, I also added more droplets to the large droplet just because it looked odd without it. Truthfully, it looks like skeleton bones to me but it wasn't meant to be a finished perfect version at this stage anyway.

I showed my mockups above to Steve Spacey who said that he liked the idea of water and that some of the stuff on my moodboard was interesting but the type does not have to be so literal and that simple type with the right visuals could convey the insight better. This made sense to me and gave me more of an opportunity to have better visuals as I was struggling with drawing the typeface graphically myself. He also said to not do all states of water as also playing with the visuals of solid and gas would confuse me and it was better to focus on the liquid state as that itself flows and can convey my insight.