Registration + Exhibits

Introduction + Opening Remarks

Overlap—The Surprising Intersection Between Story, Branding, and UX Design

How do you tell your story? What are story formulas? How can you unlock their power to fuel brands, build better user experiences and elevate your conversation with prospective clients? If people don’t buy what you do, but why you do it, how are you leveraging your story, and what makes you unique, when presenting your work online or in person? After a decade of teaching sequential design, Chris has discovered the secret structure of facilitating strategy, personal branding and tribal marketing through story. Become a better storyteller of your brand and help your clients find their story.

Design Ethics and Emotive Experiences

From delight to depressing, emotion is often thought of as a byproduct of design, rather than the driver of a great experience. But, emotion is a critical new dimension of design – one that should be governed by ethics. While designers continue to think about functionality and the way things look, there should be more discussion around the emotions that these products create, our approach to capturing them, and our responsibility to protect users.

Talk to Me

Technology has placed very specific confines around how we communicate with each other, forcing us to be a lot more conscious about what we say and how we say it. In this talk, Jennifer Daniel will explore both verbal and written language as a means of personal expression and how gifs, emojis, and memes are rooted in primal urges around a need to be seen, recognized, remembered and understood.

The Hidden Talents of Everyday Things

By pushing lo-fi experiences—like print—to their extreme, we can connect with invisible forces greater than ourselves like light, time, space, and sound. Kelli will demonstrate how unassuming materials like paper can be investigated to find new possibilities hiding in plain view (and be used to surprise and inspire an audience.)

Announcement + Lunch + Exhibits

Pick up your boxed lunch and beverage of choice and meet with our exhibitors.

Make the Logo Smaller

We can’t tell you how many times we’ve been asked, ‘So, branding—what’s that, like, designing logos or something?’ Well, yes and no. Actually, more no and no these days. See, way back when, what you looked like and how quickly people recognized you was basically what branding entailed. Back then, studios like ours dedicated their energies to crafting brands the way ranchers once forged them—for searing their mark on the cattle (AKA consumers) that belonged to them. Thankfully, those days are gone. Long gone. Good riddance.

Anyway, this is the story of how we went from old-school, identity-focused design agency to straight-up strategic consultancy—focused more on how companies act than how they look. Along the way, we’ve learned our fair share about what works, what scares the bejesus out of clients, and how to work with them to get to know their customers better (and do them a solid every now and again). Think of it as a little walk through 13 years of instructive failures and successes we can rarely take credit for.

Soul Searching for Business Success

Description coming soon.

That’s Fold-tastic!

Stuck in a tri-fold funk? Well, you won’t be for long. Get fresh ideas for your upcoming campaigns as the industry’s own “folding celebrity” shares unique and effective solutions from her extensive (and coveted) print sample library. This highly visual and inspiring presentation is filled with print “eye candy” for marketers who operate on either end of the budget spectrum.

What Makes You Click?

Description coming soon.

Designing the Future

Designers are problem solvers. The birth of each new technology – from pen to press to pixel, have all have presented designers with new opportunities and challenges. Digital interactive storytelling has created new and interesting problems for designers. Increasingly smaller screens have created a whole new set of challenges. What happens when interactivity increases but the screen goes away?

Increasingly users will have to navigate information using fewer or no visual cues and rely solely on voiced input. Graphic and visual designers have been working to solve problems in menu design, navigation, information hierarchy for years. It is designers who will solve these new problems.

Digital Assistants, hands free interactivity, and voice driven technologies are poised to grow at an exponential rate. Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana, are just the start of an avalanche of experiences that need good design. In this talk we’ll explore the opportunities and challenges of designing for voice and auditory experiences.

Designing for a Root Cause

Description coming soon.

Making Technology More Natural

From the moment we are born we are hardwired to understand our world and explore it through our senses. We are able to touch, see, hear and feel what’s around us. In addition at some point in our lives most of us have learned how to use computers and have been trained to understand the rules that govern their world. These two worlds have coexisted for a long time but are now getting closer to each other via new technologies.

In this talk Claudio will share some of the bits and pieces that are inspiring the team at Microsoft to develop Fluent Design, to make technology more accessible, easier to digest and closer to our understanding of the world.

Panel – Q&A

Do you have burning questions to ask? This is your chance. All of our speakers will be on stage to answer the questions you may have.