As they geared up for DC Design Week 2024, AIGA’s DC team wanted to create an inclusive experience to welcome everyone who relies on the creative process for their work. Teal served as AIGA’s brand partner, helping them bring their vision to life for this high-profile series of events. Our work together focused on how to showcase the design process authentically, making sure to reference all the ways creatives share our thoughts and reveal our truest selves via prose, ideas, sketching, jotting down moments of inspiration, and more.
The theme of the week is “Stories Within,” which represents an opportunity to amplify, encourage, and celebrate the impact that design has on the stories we tell.
Representation Within the Personal Creative Journey
This brand system is anchored by an underline mark that creates a space between ‘Stories’ and ‘Within,’ which has the effect of a printer or a slot. Collages, headshots, graphics, and wayfinding appear between the 2 words, setting the stage for a week focused on the personal creative journey.
This event’s audience is creative professionals who are sophisticated and mature, and that informed a lot of our approach as we considered how to showcase the new brand’s personality. This visual direction is the most distinct departure from previous Design Week brands. It’s also one of the most inclusive, with brand elements that speak to a broad range of mediums and ways of creating depending on one’s own experiences and journeys.
Concept to Reality
The new brand prioritizes a mixed media approach and uses references such as composition books, stamps and grid paper to connect the digital and analog elements of the creative process.
A Functional Toolkit
One of the main goals of this expressive brand was to make sure that it was flexible and scalable so that the DC Design Week communication team could incorporate it into a variety of promotional materials. We took great care to devise a comprehensive design system that would work for both an in-person event along with all of the associated digital promotion of that event. By striking a careful balance between offering flexibility while also establishing boundaries, we were able to bring new forms of creative expression to the event, and the DC Design Week team built on that foundation and executed.
"It's been an honor to collaborate with the team at Teal to bring this vision to life and for me as I led our committee in leveraging the brand kit to build the rest of our visual needs for this year's campaign. We've gotten so many compliments..."
