But what do you do when you’re not branding an organization? What if you’re branding an event?

Events are transient; they are here one day and gone the next.  Their target audience does not necessarily reflect the target demographic of the organization that’s putting on the event.  For instance, take the Macworld Expo.  It’s main sponsor is Macworld magazine, a periodical aimed squarely at people who have purchased a computer made by Apple, Inc. in the last ten years.  The Macworld Expo, however, is aimed at all technology companies and vendors primarily, and secondarily at technology consumers.  Notice the word “computer” isn’t mentioned.  The Macworld Expo competes mainly against technology expos like E3.  Therefore, the branding of each year’s Macworld Expo is completely independent of Macworld Magazine.

Macworld Magazine Website Homepage

Macworld Expo Website Homepage

So, let’s get down to the how-to part of this article.

1. Interview someone who carries the vision/mission for the event.  This usually doesn’t have to be the president of whatever organization is putting on the event.  You’ll probably find someone in management or an event planner that understands the core purposes of the event.
2. Don’t get caught up in the administrative details of the event.  When you are doing the interview, most managers will want to speak about what the conference will do; that’s not important for the branding.  The promotion and branding must come from the vision, the purpose, the “heart” of the event.  If there is a central theme to keynote addresses, these will be more important to communicate than any particular element of the event.
3. Decide on a central person to highlight in the advertising.  Usually there’s a keynote speaker that’s relatively famous.  You’ll want to make this person central in the advertising. Remember that people connect with people; there’s no greater draw to an event than a human face.  If the event you are branding doesn’t have a keynote speaker, there’s probably some major event or offering that you can highlight.  For instance, if you’re marketing a state fair, you could focus on a favorite competition or a new roller coaster ride.  This “rule” has to be held loosely.  Sometimes it’s best to make a theme the focus of your marketing efforts instead of a person.
4. Decide on a primary and secondary target demographic.  Hopefully the event organizers already have a demographic in mind.  If so, make sure your visual language fits the audience.  You don’t want to use dark, grunge, death metal imagery if your target audience is women over the age of 65 living in rural Georgia, USA.  Conversely, you don’t want to use pink doilies in your design if the target audience is men under the age of 30 living in London, England.
5. Your theme should be original enough to stand out amidst it’s medium (direct mail, email newsletter, website ad banner, etc.) but not so trend-setting as to be unrelatable to the target audience.  This is the core of what it means to be a trend-setting designer. You have to push the boundaries—your own personal skill boundaries and the perceptions of your viewers—but you have to keep your design sufficiently rooted in pop culture. That is, unless you’re looking to shock people.
6. Get a budget figure up-front for all the marketing of the event.  You’ll have to figure in printing costs, shipping for printed materials, domain/hosting for website(s), stock photography, or hiring a photographer, etc. All of that has to be taken into consideration before you quote a price for your part in everything.
7. Lastly, remember to have fun. You’re branding something that’s going to be here and gone very quickly, so don’t invest too much into the project emotionally.  If it gets too tedious, drop the project and move on!

I think this particular image has some more work to be done to it.  It makes me think of Frodo saying “Get off the road!” in the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring movie.  I’d like to bring out more of the forest’s menacing qualities without losing the beauty of the composition.

For the grand opening, I designed postcard size invite cards, but because we are a non-profit gallery, we do not charge commission on the art that sells, so our budget stays pretty small.  Our purpose as a gallery is to serve local artists by helping them get their work in the public eye for free, and to help people that appreciate art to be able to more easily view and purchase local art.

For the second show, I was able to get a sponsorship from Uprinting.com, who has listed us in their Gold Sponsorship U-Community program.  Because of that, we were able to afford to use Uprinting to print two 6 foot wide × 3 foot tall outdoor vinyl banners, with fade-resistant inks.

My design features two primary elements: the Affinity Art Gallery logo and the words “Open Weekly”.  Of secondary visual importance are the words below “Open Weekly”, followed by the gallery’s slogan, placed vertically along the far right edge.  The road that runs in front of the building is a 50mph zone, so the banner had to be economical in what it communicated.  There was not sufficient room to have much text, since that would lead to no one reading it at all!  Below is a photograph of the finished banner, mounted to metal stakes.

Photograph of the vinyl banner at the gallery

Front of the Awaken Tee Shirt

Back of the screen printed grey tee shirt for Awaken City Church

In addition, I created a large format exterior sign for Awaken.  They are currently meeting in a large conference center, so the signage needed to be semi-permanent.  The solution was to create a high quality, durable exterior vinyl banner in full color.  The size is fifteen feet wide × seven feet tall, with plenty of reinforced grommets to prevent wrinkling.  The quality of the banner is such that it can be used indefinitely as the church moves into a permanent location.  We were able to print at a high dpi so that the concrete cracks and background Greensboro cityscape are able to be seen, but don’t distract from the important data.  The impact of a 15 foot wide banner is quite noticeable.

Exterior Vinyl Banner Design for Awaken's Grand Opening

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church logo and brand design

Website Design

Awaken City Church needed several things: a way to quickly showcase upcoming events and sermon series, play videos, have realtime Twitter updates from various Twitter accounts, post sermons online, blog, display a map, have multiple administrator permission levels and have the usual “About Us” material.

To provide a solution, I used the Joomla content management system with the K2 component for user and article management.  This setup allows church volunteers to manage the site without having access to sensitive information on the site.  I created custom graphics for the site which go along with the brand’s ideas of graffiti, inner city, underground movement/power to the people, etc.

Below are two more screenshots of the site.

Custom graphics displaying photos of church leadership. Twitter module on right.

Screenshot of Google map integration

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church logo and brand design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design and exterior signage

I started with the mighty Jos Buivenga’s Museo Sans font for the precision and geometric properties, then manipulated it until it could be used as a graffiti stencil. Then I distressed it further, adding paint splatters and an overspray boundary until the client was happy with the amount of grunge.  I initially used a much cleaner version where just the “A!” was stenciled, but the client really wanted some serious grunge, so I poured it on thick!

The identity system is built around the idea of graffiti.  The “A!” can be used separately from the logo in various applications, as shown in some production comps I threw together:

Digital comp of the Awaken logo in stencil format

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church website design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design, exterior large format signage

This card needed to be small, attractive, easily read and friendly in its presentation.  I did all the design and copywriting for it.  I also used the card to subtly push the realigned KCC brand, as see in this article.  I used the same corporate identity definitions of font and color to do it, while keeping the purpose of this particular card clear.  The cityscapes on the card are Greensboro and Winston-Salem, to large cities around Kernersville, and the most likely location the cards would be used.

I used a gradient on a almost-neutral gray background to reference the spotlighting employed in the gallery and the fonts I chose are all created by Jos Buivenga of Exljbris, a Dutch typography company.  The “A” is set in Museo 900 and the brand’s fonts are Fontin Sans.

You can visit the Affinity Gallery website here.

Over the course of two years, the vision has been further refined, and because KCC is essentially a “replant” of a church, the “culture” of the church has changed drastically over two years.  I helped redesign the interior of the church, bringing in modern colors and lighting to the space, and the church is now doing lots of outreach.  In addition, the style of the meetings has changed to a cutting edge experience.  It became clear to me that my 2007 identity had quickly become outdated.  Normally a brand/identity will last much longer than two years, but in special cases, an identity can become outdated if the vision, mission, values or corporate culture of the organization change in large measure.  In KCC’s case, the corporate culture changed enough to cause a disconnect with the identity.  What KCC needed was not a redesign; rather a realign was the best option because the core vision and values had not changed; just the atmosphere of the church.

I kept the basic premise of the brand intact, but updated the typography, adjusted the color scheme and proportions to show a more cutting-edge, modern aesthetic, along with more aggression.  KCC is a church with a lot of forward motion, so the new identity had to reflect that.

The logotype was originally Myriad Pro with Garamond Premier Pro as the subtitle.  They had been chosen for a clean-but-creative look.  For the realigned identity, I chose Bree Extra Bold Oblique for the title and Zapatista for the subtitle.  Bree is a typeface with a pleasing upright-italic feel that exhibits lots of creative flair—KCC has lots of artists and a public art gallery in its building—and Zapatista is an aggressive grungy typewriter font.  I proportioned everything inside the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. Divine Ratio) to show a sense of order amid all the gutteral grunge treatments.  I also removed the vintage surround of the identity to demonstrate the shift from history to future.

My 2007 (top) and 2009 (bottom) logos

The realigned identity is being implemented slowly, as needs arise. This is done to keep costs down for this [essentially] young church.