LeadCon 2021
What I worked on:
Art Direction | Design | Illustration | Motion Design | Brand
A brand inspired by bioluminescence.
In 2021, the pandemic was still going strong and people were starting to feel it more than ever. A weight had fallen on the shoulders of leads as they tried to keep up morale and excitement in the workplace during a difficult time. The leads needed to reignite the light within themselves and within their teams and so we gave them that light through bioluminescence.
As I developed this brand, a sort of beautiful symbiosis occurred between the events of 2020 and this event. At LeadCon in 2020, we challenged our leads to make waves of impact and at Support Summit, we showed how one could thrive on the immense change through the allegory of plants growing in harsh environments. With LeadCon 2021, we were able to further enforce these narratives by making those waves of impact glow with phosphorescence and by showing that not only could life grow in the darkest parts of world, it could also create light.
Interesting visuals within our virtual talks continued to be a necessity. A person talking to a camera while sitting at their desk had lost its novelty early on in the pandemic and so it was important for me to make our talks more attention grabbing than before.
For workshops, speakers had access to a deck stocked with pre-built animations to be filled with their content. For mainstage speakers, content was customized. Speakers would submit graphic requests to myself to later be made within After Effects and Premiere. As talks were pre-recorded, I was also able to scrub through each one to look for missed opportunities for something eye catching to appear on the screen. I wanted each talk to be unique and memorable so that they stood out from the blur of virtual meetings that our attendees had been taking part in for so long.
Because the need for interesting visuals had become increasingly important, motion graphics quickly became the heart of the LeadCon 2021. These graphics were able to give life to the ever changing environment below the surface of the ocean. Gradients changed to simulate the current of the water and the refraction of light, and illustrations would glow to simulate bioluminescence.
With motion, we were able to tell our event's story but that story needed a main character and so, our sprite was born: an embodiment of the mission that we were sharing with our leads. With this sprite, I was able to further the metaphor of our leads being the light in the dark times that their teams were experiencing for as it swam through the waters around it, a trail of glowing light would follow.
