Objective

An annual event has to be the same event and a different proposition every year. Returning delegates need to recognise it; the people who did not come last time need a reason that was not available last time.

Most conference identities solve this with a new colourway and a new photograph, which gets the recognition and skips the reason. And in 2020 the problem changed shape entirely: a conference nobody could attend has to hold an audience that can close the tab at any moment, with none of the things a venue does for you.

Creative response

Event identity, programme, agenda and broadcast design at Coriolis Technologies.

• 2020, online. A thirteen-page virtual event programme, a Fireside Conversations strand recorded as individual sessions, midweek films between the live days, and a promotional card per session carrying the speaker's name against the question they were there to answer
• Social artwork cut per day and per platform: separate LinkedIn and Twitter artwork for Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, rather than one asset resized
• A proposition each year, and a line to act on. 2021 as Beyond Sustainability; 2022 as Consequence, set large enough to be the entire cover, with Change starts now carried as the strapline across the event material
• A cover device that argues. Three Earths side by side, labelled A, B and C, consequence stated as a choice between outcomes rather than illustrated as a mood
• The FOS22 mark, abbreviating the series into something that works at social sizes
• The programme and agenda, 22 and 23 November 2022 at the Museum of London Docklands, with the sessions named as rooms, The War Room, The Cabinet Office, and the Sustainability Awards closing the second day
• Partner material, including the economic development agency strand and its supporting artwork

Three globes labelled A, B and C is a cover that does something unusual for a conference: it poses the question the conference exists to answer. Consequence on its own is a mood. Consequence above three visibly different planets is an argument that the outcome is not settled, which is a reason to attend.

Naming the sessions as rooms rather than as topics does the same work on the agenda. The War Room and The Cabinet Office tell a delegate what kind of conversation to expect and what will be asked of them, where Panel: Geopolitics and Trade tells them where to sit.

The year it had to be a broadcast

The 2020 edition ran online, and the design problem inverts when the venue disappears. A room holds people through inertia; they are there, their coat is there. A stream holds nobody, so every session has to be sold individually, to somebody deciding in the two seconds a thumbnail is on screen.

So the promotional card became the unit of the event rather than the programme. Each one pairs a speaker with the question they are answering, looking to a post-Covid world, what does the future for sustainability look like, because a name alone assumes the viewer already knows why that person is worth an hour.

Naming the recorded strand Fireside Conversations is the other half. It sets the expectation at conversation rather than presentation, which is both achievable over a video call and the only thing a video call is actually better at.

• 2020, online. A thirteen-page virtual event programme, a Fireside Conversations strand recorded as individual sessions, midweek films between the live days, and a promotional card per session carrying the speaker's name against the question they were there to answer
• Social artwork cut per day and per platform: separate LinkedIn and Twitter artwork for Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, rather than one asset resized
• A proposition each year, and a line to act on. 2021 as Beyond Sustainability; 2022 as Consequence, set large enough to be the entire cover, with Change starts now carried as the strapline across the event material
• A cover device that argues. Three Earths side by side, labelled A, B and C, consequence stated as a choice between outcomes rather than illustrated as a mood
• The FOS22 mark, abbreviating the series into something that works at social sizes
• The programme and agenda, 22 and 23 November 2022 at the Museum of London Docklands, with the sessions named as rooms, The War Room, The Cabinet Office, and the Sustainability Awards closing the second day
• Partner material, including the economic development agency strand and its supporting artwork

The year it had to be a broadcast

Watch

The work