The complete guide to conference design
Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer. It just happened that I was leading design team at GDG DevFest Ukraine conference during the last 7 years ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Everything in this article is based on my own experience and can differ for other teams and events.
Designers are involved in all parts of the conference organization like marketing, web development, speakers and sponsors management, etc. Involved from the very beginning, like the first post on your social network or the first email to your attendees.
Design is a universal language to communicate with your audience. Your results are completely dependent on the effort you invest into it. In most cases:
People don’t care about the design as long as the conference has it.
But a professional design shows the level of a conference. I want to share with you our insights and some tips and tricks on how to bring your event to the next level.
TL;DR
This article will give you some insights for conference organization beginners, and for the experienced organizers — give inspiration and the chance to bring a brand to the next level.
Links:
Before the announcement
- cover photo for social networks
- profile photo
- partnership proposition
The first thing you should think of is the main theme of the conference, which will be noticeable in all your designs and should promote your event even without explicit signs.
The theme should express your team’s beliefs and show a connection with the attendees. This year at DevFest Ukraine we had space cats with lasers. Why? Because nobody was using them before and developers love to share images of cats :) In addition to this, posts with a kitty that has lasers in its eyes attract more attention than boring Facebook posts.
The design should evoke emotions.
Cover photo
I would recommend starting with a page profile and cover photo for social networks as these are the most viewable parts in your promotion and they will give you a basic concept of your next design materials.
Essential parts of the cover:
- logo
- dates (when a user opens your page, they should see when the conference will take place)
- slogan (if you have one)
The profile photo
It should be pretty simple, as in most cases, it doesn’t exceed 64px. Don’t add small details, people will not see them anyway. However, make sure to use vivid colors to be easily recognizable among other accounts.
Color scheme and elements library
In the end, you should define conference colors in RGB and CMYK schemes. It’s always better to think about printing materials at the beginning to avoid unexpected issues when it would be too late to change something.
Probably you want to define several design elements for the later use. It doesn’t mean you need to have dozens of them. 2–5 elements would be more than enough. You can always resize them, rotate or change color, and get a completely new image as a result.
Why it’s good to have defined a library of elements and color scheme? Suppose one of your designers is in the middle of the journey to Japan without a laptop or just doesn’t have time to create a new image for a post. With such elements and color scheme, everyone with basic knowledge of graphics tools can create images if you are time-bound.
But in general, don’t tell designers to do tasks ASAP! They are creative people and it takes time to design something special and beautiful. Give the task 1–2 weeks in advance or even better indicate all graphic materials you need during the preparation.
Don’t tell designers to do tasks ASAP!
To make it easier for you I’ve made a Trello board (we use this tool pretty much everywhere) with all the tasks we had during the last 3 years in chronological order. Between them, you will find time dividers that define what you need to do before a certain deadline. Copy the board, remove/add own tasks, and start creating something awesome!
Time limits are based on our experience, assuming your preparation starts 7–9 months before the conference, everyone works in their spare time and has personal life beyond the conference :) Just keep in mind, that closer to the date X, you will always have unexpected tasks or additional requests. Do tasks as soon as possible and then you will enjoy the conference instead of recovering from sleepless nights.
Partnership proposition
Now let’s move to the next task — partnership proposition. It is a quite complex project with plenty of pages and complex solutions, especially when you need to put a lot of text on the page and make it readable and attractive.
Usually, we divide the proposition into the next sections:
- about the conference
- about the team of organizers
- venue information
- attendees statistics from the previous year (number, interests, position, etc.)
- attendees and speakers feedback highlights
- comparison table of sponsorship packages
- every package described in details
- contact information
For sure you need the website with all the information about the conference, speakers, schedule and so on. We also covered that for you! Check out Project Hoverboard — conference website template with the adjustable theme to meet your style!
That’s it! Now you are ready to announce your conference to the public 🎉
4 months before the conference
The next few months are the most relaxed. No big updates or announcements — just keep your audience in the loop about the current stage of the organization progress and attract new people. Post the highlights video, session recordings, photos from the previous year, ask about the interests of your audience and their recommendations regarding the speakers they want to see.
Believe me, they will be very surprised and grateful if you bring at least one speaker, who helped them to become who they are now. Like we did with Daniel Galpin — during the whole DFUA’18 he was meeting people who started Android development with his Udacity course.
Keep your audience in the loop about the current state of the organization and attract new people.
This time range includes:
- speaker feedback card
- sponsor announcement
- speaker announcement
- tickets pack sold out
- c4p last call
- poster
- banner
Speaker feedback card
We always ask speakers/attendees/sponsors to give short feedback on the conference and use it to engage more participants and fill the period of silence.
Speakers announcement
Most likely during that time, you will have some speakers to announce. There is no need to put all the information about a speaker on the image. Moreover, if you have more than 20 speakers you likely would want to combine several speakers by technology/stream. So keep it simple:
- speaker’s photo
- name
- company (I would recommend adding a logo instead as it’s more recognizable than just text)
- country (it doesn’t mean that you have bad developers/speakers in your country, but people are more interested to see speakers from abroad.. so if you have some speakers from other countries it’s much better for your promotion)
- conference logo
- dates
- website
Approximately 4–6 months before the Date X you will have all speakers, several sponsors and sell the first pack of tickets. So now you can start promotion on posters or/and banners and put them on your local events, conferences of friendly communities, offices, universities, etc.
Other
Try to design the next items in advance:
- sponsors announcement
- tickets half/full pack sold out
- c4p last call
- A3 poster
- banner
As you may have noticed, we added cats! Crazy levitating cats with laser eyes. What is the connection with Google technologies or any technology? In our community, we believe that most tech people love space cats + it shows that we are NOT a corporate event that would never put such a thing on the promotion, we want to prove that we are NOT AN ORDINARY CONFERENCE!
We want to prove that we are NOT AN ORDINARY CONFERENCE!
2 months before
This is your last chance to relax. Take a short vacation, drink beer with your friends, spend more time with your family because later you will be completely involved in the conference.
During this time you will finish most of the promotional images:
- keynote speaker announcement
- last tickets
- discounts
- “justify your trip” letter
Let’s take a closer look at the last item. It was the first time we tried that and the main idea was to help the attendees convince their managers to participate in the conference. They can copy the text from the document and send it via email or edit the text inside and send that document instead.
Last month
Until that time (or even earlier) you should have all the designs that will be printed in great volume or are complicated to produce. Usually, we spend one week on price negotiation and mock-up approval, 2–3 weeks printing, and one week on logistics (sometimes it’s cheaper to print in another city or even country but you will have to take care of the shipment).
What we had this year:
- swag
- coffee cups
- popcorn cups
- bags
- badges
- lanyards
- t-shirts
- notebooks
- stickers
- printed schedule
Usually, the total amount of each item is the number of all conference participants (attendees + speakers + volunteers + sponsors + organizers) multiplied by 1.5–2.
Let’s look at each of these tasks.
Swag
Do useful gifts.
If you want to give something to your participants, think about a thing they will not throw away on the first day of the conference. Don’t “overbrand” it. This year at DevFest Ukraine we had socks, the previous year we gave buffs.
We believe it must be something people want to wear every day and it must have a little branding (logo or hashtag) in the place which will NOT be visible most of the time.
Coffee and popcorn cups
Brand everything you can.
Instead of boring cups, you can put your logo, call to action, hashtag or anything you want, including funny images. As you may guess, we had cats! Lots of them. Also, we put our hashtag everywhere, so attendees would definitely remember which hashtag to use on their photos on social media.
For popcorn cups, we could print full-color designs. We used our previously defined background, elements, added CTAs, our slogan “Not an ordinary ̶c̶o̶n̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ popcorn” and put cats for sure! The idea behind these cats: the biggest one heats corn with the lasers from its eyes, and small popcorn-cats starting to fall down 🙀.
Most people will not see these details but those who will notice them will be totally blown away and like your conference even more.
Most people will not see details but those who will notice them will be totally blown away.
Bags
Make eco bags.
It’s not only about avoiding plastic. Even paper bags aren’t really good because most participants will probably throw them away the next day after the conference. On the other hand, if you make comfortable and beautiful bags, people will use them every day and you may even meet your attendee with this bag in a grocery store :) For the last two years, we have made bags with two short handles and one long strap. They are easy to hang on a shoulder or carry in hands.
The only thing I want to change next time is to remove the sponsor logos. It’s good to have a lot of partners and the bags improve their visibility, but I am more attendee-focused and believe that without the logos, people would use these bags much more often.
Badges
Make different design for each group.
It’s good to have a different color (or/and layouts) for each group of participants (attendees, speakers, volunteers, organizers, etc.). For attendees, it would be much easier to find a volunteer or organizer to ask something or find speakers in the crowd and use the unique possibility to discuss the questions they have. For organizers, it’s an additional security layer. For instance, you can limit access to a private room only for specific badge colors.
What you should have on a badge:
- name (as big as possible)
- surname
- company name
- conference logo
- dates
- participant group
- wifi password
- schedule (timeline with the most important events will be enough)
- link to the website (with full schedule)
- Call to action (e.g., “Join the conversation!”)
Make the name as big as possible.
Over the years we’ve tried different sizes and settled on 14x9 cm. I recommend making 2 holes for a lanyard to prevent the badge from flipping to the side. Print the badges on durable thick paper (300+ gsm) with lamination or plastic with rounded corners. Then attendees will not hurt themselves with the sharp corners and lamination will last longer (remember that this item will be on 80% of the photos).
Lanyards
Make a colorful one.
Don’t use cheap lanyards you can buy at any store. Use your brand colors and add other brand elements. Don’t forget about the logo! You can sell the place on the lanyard to sponsors, but don’t overload it with the logos.
Don’t make it too long. It should allow the attendees to avoid looking down to see a participant’s name on a badge (usually people don’t want to make it obvious that they forgot other person’s name). Our ideal size is 78x2 cm.
The specification is inspired by Web Summit blog post about Math and conference.
T-shirts
Make a simple design.
There is no need to put a big logo at the center of a t-shirt. Instead, try to create a design with your brand elements that will reference to the conference, but don’t point to it directly.
We do use different colors for each group of participants but it’s not necessary. The idea is the same as with the badges. Volunteers/speakers/organizers should be easily recognizable in the crowd. Especially the volunteers, so make sure to print bright-colored t-shirts for them. Also, in our case, each type of a t-shirt had a different slogan: “Not an ordinary speaker/crew/organizer/conference”.
Volunteers/speakers/organizers should be easily recognizable among the crowd.
Volunteers additionally had “Crew” text on their back, so they will be easily recognizable from the back as well.
Notebooks
Use clean sheets.
Nowadays developers don’t write much, but a notebook can be a nice place to make some notes during the conference, sketches, drawings on the go. That’s why we believe it should be a small A6 format notebook with clean craft paper sheets without any lines and, therefore, any limits to creativity.
Stickers
Show your creativity.
For sure you can print the logo of the conference and that would be enough. But just ask yourself, will your attendee put such a sticker on a brand new laptop? I don’t think so. It’s should be something crazy enough and special to do so. We had cats, for sure. But not only them, but we also want to be inclusive for everyone so half of them made with dogs 🐕.
Fun fact: the first doggy sticker is the photo of one of our co-organizer’s dog.
Printed schedule
Do your best on typography.
Even on tech conferences with a comfortable schedule on a mobile phone, people still like having a paper schedule. Hopefully, over the years this will change, and we will be a more paper-free conference, but for now, we have to design such things. Best format — two-sided A4.
People still like having a paper schedule.
Recommended parts:
- timetable with session titles and speaker’s info
- venue map
- logo
- slogan
- important announcements (like quest advertisement, group photo time)
- sponsors
Usually, if the conference has several tracks, they are dedicated to the specific technology or theme. Assign a unique color to each of them, this visual indicator will help attendees to find what they want. Moreover, you can use these colors for on-site navigation, for instance, highlight corridor with relative color!
Last 2 weeks
Congratulations, the hardest part is finished now! In this sprint we gonna design items which are easy and quick to print, that’s why you can do them in the last 2 weeks.
Items on this time range:
- food tags and description tablets
- presswall
- photobooth items
- on-site schedule banners
- on-site call to actions
- speaker personal cards
- free drinks tokens
- facebook avatar overlay
- demo zone descriptions
- welcome to Lviv sign
- toilet jokes
- party banner
Food tags
Make the choice easier.
Stickers for food boxes are the only thing you need to print in a big number during this stage. It’s not that crucial, but as I said in the previous chapter — brand everything you can. Our stickers only included the name of a dish on a unique color background. The detailed information about the ingredients we have put on an A2 piece of paper at the back of the boxes.
As a result, it was easy to find the right food for participants and even catering was branded with our style! Small details show the level of the conference.
Presswall
Choose the right size.
In 2015 we didn’t think much about the size and logo placement. As a result, even short people like me covered the conference logo with their body. For a group photo, everything is even harder. You can see the results on the photo below.
Make it as big as possible to ensure that when a bunch of people take a photo together the main logo is still visible. Unfortunately, we had space limitations this year and the biggest presswall we could have was 4.9x3 m. Ideally, your presswall should be about 5.5x3.5 m with logo at 2 m height. In this case, 90% of the photos will have your brand on the background. The slogan here will be visible only in the standby state, but that’s fine as people won’t always stand there.
Make a presswall as big as possible, so that a bunch of people can take a photo together.
Photobooth items
Design not ordinary items.
To make photos in front of the banner more interesting and unique, we provide sticks with different logos, animals, celebrities or any other things that people would like to grab and to take a photo with them. An easy and cheap solution — A3 thick paper on a wooden stick and here you go. Spend more time on creating funny designs :)
As a result, you will have photos similar to this:
On-site schedule banners
Quick to check.
Banners are the easiest and cheapest way to do an on-site schedule. Just print an x-banner and place it at the hall entrance where attendees can check all the sessions of the day. Don’t forget about the customized color for the track, that you have on the website, schedule inserts, navigation signs and here.
On-site calls to action
Make the most of your venue.
This year we held the conference at the cinema with huge posters (A1) on the walls and smaller ones (A4) on the tables. And we branded them! To make them more useful, we put CTAs like wifi password, party announcement, free popcorn/coffee signs, hashtag info, etc.
As a result, we had organically branded venue with important information everywhere.
Speaker personal cards
Make something personal.
To make something special for our speakers we designed welcome cards (A6 format) and left them in their hotel room. The most touching thing was a handwritten welcome message from our content commitee. But we tried to make it also useful, as we put emergency contact info on the back side.
Other
Bathroom jokes are something special at our conference. In 2014, we had a pretty nice venue but with really bad toilets. To make them look a little bit better we decided to put programming jokes on the walls and doors for some fun and a more pleasant experience. After that, it became our tradition :)
Last week
One week before the conference you are polishing the last things, which, in most cases, will be used on screens:
- screen layouts
- wallpaper
- screensaver
- next session announcement
- screen announcements
Let’s take a closer look at on each of them.
Screen layouts
Get maximum from your canvas.
In the previous years, we had to build the stages ourselves and our traditional construction was screen and banners on the sides with our logo and some sponsors. But this year, we were lucky enough to have an IMAX screen! There was no need to add additional banners, so we divided our screen layout into several parts:
- presentation (main part)
- speaker camera with info
- sponsors info
- next session info
- logo, hashtag and slogan of the conference
If you have a huge screen — put your logo and slogan at the bottom. In this case, you will see the conference brand elements on 80% of the photos of speakers on the stage.
Put your logo and slogan on the bottom of the screen.
Wallpaper
Think about all the visible places.
Sometimes speakers are doing live demos from a laptop. When they switch the screens, you may see a desktop, so why don’t you brand it? Make a simple image in your colors and kindly ask speakers to set it during your presentation. Perfection in details!
Perfection in details!
Screensaver
Make simple animation.
Before/after the conference or during long breaks you can put some animation on your screen. Just make it simple and unobtrusive since attendees can watch it for a long time and eventually it will annoy them.
Next session announcement
Show useful information.
The time between presentations is a good chance to show your participants what is happening on other tracks or announce some special events. Create an image or an additional slide in your track managers’ presentation with that information.
Screen announcements
Use all the equipment you have.
Sometimes venues do have screens on the walls and if you can connect to them, it’s a great place to put sponsors promotion and important conference announcements. For instance, we put a reminder about the party on the first day with free shuttle info, so there was no need to look for that info on the website, social networks, or any other resources — all information was readily available.
Conference day(s)
In theory, if you follow this calendar you should not have any tasks during the last days. But as it always happens you will have something to do. It can be some blog posts, email design or additional on-site navigation.
You never know, so be prepared!
During the conference, try to relax and enjoy the awesome job you have done!
Week after
Get some rest!
But after that, we still have something to finish. The last big task:
- intro and outro images for session recordings.
Use previously defined colors for tracks, put session title with speakers details and that would be more than enough. Make text huge, and image catchy so it can grab user attention from a small YouTube thumbnail.
Make text huge, and image catchy.
Consider adding a place for suggested videos on the outro. It will keep a user on your channel for a longer time, especially if you provide relevant suggestions.
Final notes
That’s, for sure, not the complete list of tasks. I haven’t mentioned email designs, different promotional materials on social networks, speakers presentation templates and many many other things. Being a designer at a conference is not a piece of cake but it gives you opportunities to grow the brand from the ground, challenge yourself in different ways and see the results in a short period of time.
This is hard to be a designer at the conference but it gives you opportunities to grow.
Please keep in mind that you should get inspired by others but never copy them. If you read a whole article, you should realize how much efforts people put into designs to make the brand truly unique. Respect the work of people and develop your very own style.
Get inspired by others but never copy them.
I hope you enjoyed this article! Don’t forget to check out other articles from our team. Good luck with the new project and keep it rockin’!
P.S. Special thanks to our team of designers ❤️ I learned so much working with them. Without their input, we would never be able to reach such a level of conference organization.
