I was tasked with designing two celebratory events in 2019 for the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, it’s 35th birthday celebrations and the graduation. Both events were twinned as they were happening one after another on the same day and in the same venue in Central London.
Assets
Branding the “look” of the events meant a variety of digital, print, and physical assets had to be produced. For the graduation this resulted in:
A4 4pp programme
Badges
Rollup banners
Social media presence
Venue stage assets
Signage
Award card
Certificates
Digital invites
Webpage
Feedback form
ClientION
RoleLead designer
Output mediumPrint, Digital, Product
Design concept
This was a twinned event focussed on bringing people together for a celebration, with ION at the centre of it. It was also the first live event following a major brand redesign and evolution for ION.
I therefore proposed to brand around the concept of the “atom”. The atom is a unit of matter composed of electrons circling a nucleus (made up of neutron and protons). Speaking in abstract terms, this is what the event entailed. People coming together.
The benefit of this approach was it allowed for simple, scalable graphics that let the new core identity elements be introduced to people.
The result was a series of different sized spheres comping together to form one overall sphere. Depending on the medium, the graphics would then be framed and cropped at different sizes (to either show the whole main sphere or parts of it). To give further depth to the spheres text was placed between some of these spheres.
The main colour a royal blue (the department colour for ION alumni), complimented by the main ION green.
Fonts used were (the new default ION body font) Calibri and Kepler (the new default ION heading font).
Printing and finishing
To keep costs down some elements were sent to the printers (CPUK Print Publishing) while others were printed in house using the Xerox C60 Fiery equipped printer.
Items printed in house included badges, award cards, certificates, feedback forms, and venue signage.
This years graduation was a significant event, due to the twinned 35 year birthday celebrations. I wanted to reflect this prestige through the assets by elevating the print finish, hoping to add something to the graduation programme and award cards. Unfortunately as a non-profit educational charity ION operates on a strict budget and regular finishing (foil stamp, emboss, UV, etc) was too expensive.
To overcome this I decided to manually finish them myself after hours. I purchased a Montana GLITTER spray can and constructed a (card) template of various circular holes. It was then a simple exercise of spraying select spheres on the cover of the 200 event programmes and award cards. Afterwards they were set to dry. The whole process took one evening.
