TEDxTufts 2018 (and 2019).

Visual Design, Creative Direction, Print Design

Design Tools Used: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign

TEDxTufts is one of the only entirely student-run TEDx events in the USA.

As the design director for TEDxTufts 2018, I was responsible for leading the team that created a design identity that visually represented our 2018 event theme.

The theme for 2018 was Re: Vision, a play on the words "vision" and "revision." This wordplay was meant to convey the perspective shifts and changes that TEDx talks can bring. 

Part I: The Problem.

TEDxTufts was in its 4th iteration and ticket sales were dropping. 

When I stepped into the role of Design Director, I sought to create a bold event brand design that could reinvigorate sales. 

Part II: Discovery.

User Research

In many conversations with my classmates about TEDxTufts, I discovered that people were primarily interested in the event because of the TEDx brand. They had minimal incentive to attend the event and, more importantly, there was little excitement over individual speeches.

This lack of interest contrasted with the organizing team's own excitement about the talks, which in some years included talks about the multiverse and the lessons one can gain from observing eels' behavior.

Design brainstorming.

In the brainstorming sessions, the direction I set for the team was that in order to get people excited about the event, we need to get people excited about individual talks. Participants attend TEDx events not only because it's a TEDx event, but rather because they want to learn more about a specific topic.

Thus, our design iterations revolved around placing more emphasis on advertising individual speaker's talks and played with the idea of representing each talk as an icon. 

Moreover, since the posters were placed in high-traffic areas where students would spend a few seconds looking at posters, we had to design posters to be as eye-catching and easily digestible as possible. This meant little text and bold design elements. One such idea was using bold colors.

Part III: The Solution.

Our final designs revolved around using circles as the form of the icons and varying the design of the circles to reflect each talk - the circles acted as irises, an abstract interpretation of the Re:Vision theme.

Both the event and individual talks had their own unique posters and icons.

More importantly, this style ensured that each talk had a visually distinct representation, allowing for a speaker-focused marketing effort where the topic of each talk was prominently highlighted in the poster.

The distinct speaker posters allowed us to advertise individual speeches and drive up excitement for the topics at the event. However, this design choice created another issue -  how else can we tie these speaker posters back to the event itself?

I took advantage of posters as a physical medium - since there were common design elements across the icons, I decided that every poster would come in pairs; the left poster displayed the event details and would always remain consistent, while the right poster would vary based on the individual speaker talks.

This dual-poster allowed us to not only link the speaker posters to the TEDxTufts brand, but also create a distinct marketing campaign that would differentiate ourselves from the marketing campaigns from other student organizations. Additionally, I utilized the bold red colors of the TEDx brand prominently in the design (especially so with the left poster).

Part IV: The Lesson Learnt.

Taking the lessons into TEDxTufts 2019.

While ticket sales improved by over 20%, we did not sell out as we had hoped for.

I stayed as the Design Director for the 2019 event planning team. Reflecting on the 2018 event, I identified two main areas for improvement:

1. Icons may be too obscure.

Icons are powerful tools because they tell a story with no words. However, because of the complex nature of some of the talks, we found some icons difficult to design while some were difficult to understand. 

2. Go bolder.

The dual-poster format and the bold red colors were shown to be popular on campus. To further boost sales, we had to be even bolder in our designs to differentiate ourselves even more and make TEDxTufts the premiere event at Tufts.

With these lessons, the new designs for the 2019 event embodied these core values:

Speaker-Focused, Bold, Unique.

Rather than use icons, we simplified the talk titles into broader but eye-catching phrases. Moreover, to further stand out, each talk also had its unique color while maintaining common design elements distinct to TEDxTufts (the TEDx 'X').

With this new speaker-focused campaign, our 2019 event sold beyond capacity, the first in the event's 5-year history.