TED 2024
Role: Designer (lead designer for this specific project)
Team: Peter Zweifel, Mike Femia, Casey Walter, Nancy Hu, Diana Pietrzak, Elizabeth Zeeuw, Gilberto Tadday
TED’s flagship conference in 2024 also marked the org’s 40th anniversary. The visual identity for “The Brave and The Brilliant” needed to live up to it’s name—both as a premium conference and a celebration of TED’s history. I worked closely with my team to develop a visual direction that felt unabashed and vibrant yet still elevated and sophisticated.
I was involved in every step of the design process, from initial concepts and crafting brand guidelines to final production of print and digital assets. Alongside my team, I created this hand-drawn type approach and illustration system.
AI is a huge part of what’s discussed at the conference, but TED’s brand also first and foremost, human. The visual identity we crafted was a celebration of humanity and acted as a contrast between the heavy tech focus, grounding the conference in visuals that had an explicit human touch.
We were thrilled with how everything turned out, and we won the Communications Arts award for best environmental graphics in 2024.
After we settled on an overall direction based on the hand-drawn theme title, I worked with our design lead, design director and creative director to develop a color palette, type approach, illustration system and layout guidelines, all finally compiled in our style guide for the conference.
For every flagship conference, our team makes a custom program guide—a project in and of itself. For T24, we used a foil emboss on the cover to give it a premium feel. For the interior, we contrasted colorful, bold spreads with the speaker and other informational pages.
I illustrated each custom spread in the guide as well as the front and back cover.
