Project: The Combine (2019)

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Materials: Digital

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Objective: The Combine is an annual conference in Bloomington, Indiana that is the midwest catalyst for creators, builders, and doers to discover new business and technology ideas. The Combine has five core values, which are: creativity, capital, culture, code, and community. For this project, I worked in a group with two other people to design the branding for the 2019 Combine conference. My group decided that we wanted to keep the same typeface (Gill Sans) for the logo that was used in the previous year so they could avoid buying a license for a new typeface. With that being said, we wanted to change up the letterforms and make them feel like they were more involved with technology. So, we used circles and placed them within different areas of each letter to create an orbital feel within the logo. My group decided that we wanted to use a very clean and contemporary color palette after looking at the previous years branding for the Combine, which were all very crowded with colors and textures. Not only did we work on type design and color palette, but we also thought of new ways for people to interact at the conference. For example, the conference already had been doing name badges for their attendees, but we wanted to take it a step further and make the badges a more useful tool. What we did was assign a color to each core value (creativity, capital, culture, code, and community) on the badges so that when people are walking around the conference they can spot from a distance people who are there for the same interest as them. The badge also served as a map on the backside too, which showed the blueprint of the conference and where each station was. We also created some merchandise and other take aways for the conference.