WordCamp San Diego 2015

Organization: WordCamp San Diego 2015 – WordPress Convention

Project: Logo Design, Printed Materials, and Swag Design

Description: On the organizing committee for WCSD 2015, I realized that we would have lots of challenges in our new convention location, the Hall of Champions, a sports museum located in Balboa Park. There are lots of distracting exhibits and the sports theme didn’t particularly match a tech conference. The location was large, with multiple levels and areas for the event. We needed to integrate the new convention location into the theme and make the location easy to navigate for attendees.

Solution: To set the convention materials apart from the distracting background of the museum exhibits, I decided that the design needed to be simple, bold, and use a color scheme that would make it stand out. I noticed most of the exhibits contained dark colors mostly in shades of green, red, and navy. So I decided to make the colors as bright as possible, going with a pure cyan, pure magenta, pure yellow, and bright green color scheme. To make the text easy to read, I decided that it needed to be black on white or white on black. With this in mind, I came up with the slogan, “Just WordPress It,” a play on Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. The focus of of the talks would be on creating and playing around with WordPress instead of just passively learning about it. We had several bootcamps to reinforce this concept and all talks were practical instead of just theory.

Since we were in a new space, I decided that each area would be color coded and similar talks would be given in each space. We broke all the topics down into four major areas and assigned each area a color. The program and room signage were color coded to that room’s overall topic theme and signs placed around the event would also correspond to it, as well.

To continue with the sports theme, each of the speakers were given a separate t-shirt that read “COACH” on the back and all organizers were given referee shirts to make them stand out in the crowd. All swag related to sports or sporting events so that they would not only fit within the theme, but so that they would also have a practical use after the event.