Identity Design and Brand Positioning

Designing our first (and second) ever virtual conference

Re:treat is the Design Museum of Chicago’s virtual design conference that we are preparing for its fourth iteration. We began this event as a response to the COVID restrictions introduced in March of 2020 which closed our gallery and forced us to find new ways to engage with our audience. We decided to offer a free virtual conference filled with delightful and interesting distractions from the current stressors of the world, framed as a form of self care. I decided on the name, “Re:treat,” leaning in to the triple meaning it possessed: “Re:” referencing the conference’s entirely digital execution, “treat” referring to the positive nature of the content, and “retreat” being a common alternative name for a conference.

The first iteration of the conference took place in May 2020. Using the themes of impending summer and freshness, I based the identity on grocery store packaging and fruit stickers. In the primary social media and online event page image, the logo is digitally shrink-wrapped with a sticker slapped on top. Each speaker also received their own custom “sticker” image which they could then share on their own social media to promote their involvement.

I reinvented the identity for the August 2020 conference. For this one, I wanted to highlight the digital aspects of the conference and rethink the brand in an entirely new way while maintaining the same mark. In contrast to the first conference’s rich color palette, I stuck with a single color for the second. Unlike the sticker approach of the first identity, each type of event (talk, workshop, etc.) was assigned its own abstract icon which then populated the social media speaker graphics.