Project Duration

Time: Sep 2022 - May 2023

Mentors

Team

Project Lead - Kimberly Do
Design Lead - China Qin
Marketing Lead - Shriya Krani
UX Lead - Vanessa Peng
Tech Lead - Sarah Zhang
Designers - Rachel Osborne, Valerie Irawan, Emlyn Griffiths, Daisy Tuller, Nora Holland

Problem Definition

How do you design a design conference? As the Design Lead for Northeastern’s Interventions Conference in 2023, my goal was to bring together a team of nine designers to design, iterate, and synthesize five unique creative visions for the theme of 2023’s annual design conference. In the fall semester, the team and I built and tested multiple iterations of the brand. In the following spring semester, we applied its unique style to physical collateral and a digital website.

As part of the leadership team, I collaborated with the marketing and project leads to pitch the direction of Interventions: Ignite to stakeholders (university professors, sponsors, and our Scout design community).

Precedents and Breaking Expectations

As an existing brand, Interventions had a five-year history. Every year, an annual themes would cover topics, trends, and subdisciplines across design that engaged design discourse at Northeastern. One of the challenges for 2023 was to design a conference that met and exceeded the expectations set by past design conferences at the university, as each year had done before.

Developing a vision

Using various diagramming and ideation techniques in Figma, our conference team took an audience-focused, goal-driven approach, beginning with a foundational question: What is Interventions? We curated a list of impactful words that reflected the design values and practices of our peers and the broader Northeastern design community and went through rounds of moodboarding.

We established a brand identity with a focus on  the four main goals for Interventions: Ignite. Using abstract shapes that emulated the themes, we developed an illustration system that allowed for play, creativity, and exploration.

Bringing it all to Life

The identity was used to create merchandise and wireframes. In the fall, the design team developed an extensive brand identity system and created high-fidelity website wireframes for the tech team to develop and release in the spring.

In the spring, I led the design team in the creative and production process, developing physical and digital assets, including pamphlets, name cards, tote bags, T-shirts, and postcards. Our team expanded to include a Tech and UX team in the spring semester, focusing on the holistic digital and physical conference experience. This included cardboard sculptures, exhibitions, and interactive experiences throughout the venue, all applying the creative direction developed by the design team in the fall semester.