Designing with purpose: Event poster and wordmark for a five-day climate justice conference across Golden Gate Park
Role
Brand Designer
Tools
Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom
Duration
Three Weeks
A conference poster that had to do a lot of work at once.
The SF Design and Climate Justice Conference takes place across multiple venues in Golden Gate Park over five days in July. The poster needed to communicate the event name, all venue programming, dates, times, and speakers, while also feeling like a piece of design worth stopping for.
The project started with building a wordmark for the conference title, then moved into the full 24 x 36-inch poster. Two color directions were developed and tested before landing on the final.
Step 1
Research and concept
Started with the subject matter. Climate justice isn't just an environmental topic; it's a social and political one. The visual direction needed to feel urgent and human, not just green and nature-y.
Step 2
Wordmark
Designed the conference wordmark first. This became the typographic anchor for everything that followed the headline treatment, the hierarchy, and the overall tone of the poster.
Step 3
Layout and iteration
Built the 12x12 grid in InDesign and worked through multiple compositions. The challenge was organizing a dense amount of information across three venues without the poster feeling like a schedule rather than a piece of design.
Step 4
Color and refinement
Developed two full-color directions: a dark navy and red version, and a teal and orange version. Both were completed before making the final call.
