GitHub gathered all of their employees for an internal summit in Austin, TX. This was the first summit in over 2 years and the first after being bought by Microsoft. I was in charge of leading research and design for the event. The themes uncovered in the research became the foundation for the brand and curriculum of the event. I extended the brand over all digital assets, signage, and swag.
What is the problem we are trying to solve? ≠ What can and should we accomplish at Summit? The latter jumps to solutions without understanding what the need is.
A design studio is a structured brainstorming session used to research and collect data that solves a problem.
We invited a diverse subset of hubbers to participate in the design studio. Diversity for summit meant hubbers that have just joined to those who have been here for 5+ years, representatives from different teams and orgs, ethnicity, gender, location distribution, remote or HQ, parents, and so on.
At the end of the research sessions we synthesized the data into 3 key themes. In working with the executive team we able to find overlap between their goals and outcomes for the event and the sentiment of their audience.
To incorporate these themes into the branding I did a word association exercise and selected key words to create mood boards. I produced three options with proposed themes for the event.
Forward together became the theme of the event and after selecting the direction I cleaned up the logo and finalized the elements so I could apply them to signage, swag, and more.
