Plywood Presents 2016

With each passing year, Plywood Presents brings in hundreds of social innovators to hear from leading innovators, teachers, and entrepreneurs working to make a better tomorrow.

In the words of Jeff Shinabarger, the leader and founder of Plywood People, he says:

“There is an amazing sound that happens when 1000 social entrepreneurs, cultural creatives and non-profit activists convene in a location with as much history as The Tabernacle. Side conversations fill the staircases. Introductions happen everywhere you turn. Standing ovations start every presentation. New ideas are birthed, launched, shared, funded and pivoted into something better… Plywood Presents is the gathering for problem solvers, a community of start-ups doing good.”

Each year, Plywood starts fresh with a new aesthetic, color scheme, and visual style to exemplify the ever-evolving yearly event. Creatively, this is a great challenge because it forces us to dig back into inspiration, build on the prior years of art direction, and deliver something fresh and electrifying.

For Plywood Presents, design sets the stage, fills the seats, and communicates on a fundamental level what Plywood is about. This is exactly the primary purpose of good design and intuitive web design: engaging the audience. So often, people believe design is just the visuals — just execution.

Rather, good design is valuable critical thinking. It begs the questions of “What is the purpose? What are we trying to communicate? How do we want others to respond?” For Plywood, we needed design to compel attendees to buy tickets, be excited enough to invite a friend, and share their experience on social media.

This is the fundamental principal behind word-of-mouth marketing, making an experience so good users can’t help but talk about it. To do this, design plays a crucial role in building that experience, whether on the invite or the landing page. With web, its crucial to make the process from landing on the page to buying a ticket as easy and delightful as possible.

We can’t just make it look good with aesthetics. We have to make it dead simple with strategic thinking and wonderfully delightful to do so. This is a vibrant event experience, the web expereince must match that!

Below you’ll find examples of early-stage work and final compositions:

Initial concept of “sound waves” extending from the “O.”

Initial concept of a “record” spinning around the “O.”

Initial concept of “listening” to sound waves.

Finals:

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