A Digital Designer’s Take on Designing for a Conference
What it’s like to lead the design for a conference and a few lessons learned along the way.
I’ve been designing digital products for five years, and been a part of the Infinite Red team for almost a full year 🎉. Not long after I started working at IR, I was tasked with the design work for Chain React 2018. To anyone unfamiliar with the event, Chain React is the U.S. React Native conference hosted each year by Infinite Red in Portland, Oregon.
This was my first year designing for our annual conference (or for any conference, really), and let me tell you, it was super easy. Just kidding. There was a lot of work, planning, and learning involved throughout the 10 months spent working on everything. So, from print to digital, here are some of the biggest things I learned, in hopes that my fellow designers out there can benefit from my experiences — mistakes and wins.
Designs often get better over time.
Outside of icon sets or the occasional image for an empty state, I haven’t spent much time working on illustrations. For Chain React, I started on paper sketching different ideas. My sketches were rough at best. I had this idea of what I wanted it to look like, but I wasn’t happy with what I had yet. I decided to bring it into Illustrator thinking it’d be easier to continue in a more familiar medium (digital). I called it done at the end of the week.
As I worked on more of the designs, I would change small things as along the way.: adding more contrast between the buildings, making the gradients bolder, widening the spacing, etc. The more designs I made, the more refined the illustration became. The final illustration ended up being something that I was really proud of. I doubted myself (a lot) in the beginning, but it’s nice to look back and see exactly how far it came along.
Mood boards are a great way to zero in on a project’s look and feel.
We knew we wanted a futuristic theme. Chain React is all about bringing developers from around the world to discuss the future of React Native. So something with a futuristic vibe seemed fitting for an entire theater full of people in tech. Mood boards helped us brainstorm different concepts for the design without getting too focused on a specific style.
We landed on an abstract style of downtown Portland with a dark color palette and neon accents. Once we starting building out the designs, it was helpful to have the mood board to reference. It made it a lot easier to stay on track when iterating.
Designing for print ≠ designing for digital.
Our initial designs were created for digital. We had a lot of neons and a monochromatic mix of purples. Since colors vary between print and digital, we had to spend a little extra time finding print-ready colors that matched.
Another challenge was designing for something that’s 10x the size of my screen. As a (mostly) digital designer, I’m used to looking at my designs on a screen and seeing them exactly how they’d be displayed. For Chain React, however, designing a 10.5 x 6-foot banner on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is a little different. It’s harder to gauge exactly how big everything will be when printed. What may look really small (like a logo on a giant banner) is really a foot wide. A few test prints to get an idea of the size and colors helped, but they still offer only a rough idea. My home printer isn’t anywhere near the quality of a print shop, nor can I print large-scale banners. A lot of it comes down to judgment (and the help of a fellow designer that’s done it before).
Speaking of colors, t-shirt printing has its own set of challenges.
Between halftones, color restrictions, details, and overlays, I can now confidently say it takes 92 emails, 1 zoom meeting, 5 phone calls, and 3 test prints to create a great t-shirt design. But I took away a lot of lessons here, so I’m hoping for about 90 fewer emails next year.
Printing posters and banners is a lot more straightforward than apparel. For apparel, each color is printed separately, and printing small details are nearly impossible. Setting up halftones is a challenge of its own. But relaying that information to a printer, without being able to see an accurate print, is even harder. A couple key things I learned: include notes in the design file for the print team, and use industry terms to make communication easier. For example, overprint is when you print a layer of white ink underneath the design on dark shirts if you want it to look opaque. With a better understanding of how to set up my file and some knowledge of the industry terminology, the next design should be a lot smoother.
Version control apps really do help with team collaboration.
My team and I worked simultaneously on the website for Chain React. Our process at the time involved everyone working in their own file and pulling from a shared library in Sketch. The struggle with this method was that I was creating a library at the same time all three of us were designing. If I updated part of a screen, Cindy and Justin had no way of knowing. This led to a lot of long nights spent copying & pasting from one file to another to consolidate designs.
After the conference, we started using a version control app called Plant for all our Sketch files. Plant allows us to sync our sketch files together so that any time you update your file, you can send your changes for the rest of the team to use. It’s a vital part of how we work now (especially as a fully remote team).
And finally, collaboration always leads to better work.
I’d like to give a huge shout out to our development team, specifically Yulian and Zach. We had a pretty tight timeline for the website, but they were still quick to get it done. Not only did they finish on time, but they also added in some animations for the city scene that really brought everything to life. On the design side, we were able to reuse these animations in other ways to really bring the visual elements together.
Designing for an event is really different from designing a website or an app, but I’m grateful for the experience. It was an opportunity to build new skills, stretch my creativity, and learn a ton along the way. See more of our design work & behind-the-scenes process on Dribbble, Instagram, and Twitter!
