Finding Community
Edmonton Startup Week is an annual celebration of tech and startups, and is part of Techstar’s global entrepreneurship events. The week is full of workshops, socials, and events. I developed the creative direction and produced physical and digital collateral for marketing, swag, and digital event experiences.
Challenge
How might we encourage everyone to feel invited and find value?
Strategy
Rejected Ideas
Early ideas focused on celebrating “little wins”, the convenience of attending from home, or how the week can recharge your energy. These ideas just weren’t hitting right, so I conducted a more thorough brand review with the team that resulted in the chosen strategy.
The Chosen Strategy
This year’s strategy and creative direction focused on the fact that there’s not just one way to become an entrepreneur; each journey is diverse not only in the path, but in the previous experience brought to the the starting line. Our goal was to invite everyone to explore the startup community and Edmonton’s culture of innovation, and to encourage everyone to see themselves as part of it.
Advertisement, featured in Edify Magazine.
Design
Photo Woes
I couldn’t just use old photos because they had a lot of crowds—something that felt really wrong during a pandemic. We also no longer had a staff photographer, and social-distancing meant we couldn’t easily commission new photographs. It was important to represent the actual community, so illustrations wouldn’t work easily either.
Collages? Heck yeah.
A collage-aesthetic allowed me to use pre-pandemic photos, isolate people from crowds, and showcase a more diverse community. I built out a library of hand-drawn textures and photos that was flexible to work across digital and print mediums, could be mixed-and-matched different ways to build new collages, and could be handed off to other vendors as needed.
Sub events
Within Startup Week, there were a couple of key events that needed to be visually-related-but-different-looking: DemoCamp 50, Startup Crawl, and Launch Party 11.
Check out some of the collateral I designed.
I produced around 125 final pieces of collateral for startup week, including:
Google display ads
custom Remo floorplans
many, many social media graphics (organic, paid, and for sharing with network)
instagram stickers
swag (t-shirts, mailers, stickers, etc)
virtual backgrounds
Website graphics and stylings
magazine ads
startup title generator
digital light-rail-transit (LRT) ads
bumper designs for videos
daily highlight reels
document designs for internal use (PowerPoint templates, letterhead, styling etc)
grocery store print ads (self-serve kiosk bagging area and conveyor belt bar)
Results
The 5 day event proved to be a huge success with record attendance (5,907 attendees), an 86% increase in community partners (compared to the previous year), and a focus on greater representation from other industries and areas of expertise.
Wrap-up video created by the amazing Chris
Hey there. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.