After a couple of initial rounds of creative exploration, I took the stakeholders' feedback on board and approached the next iteration with a near-clean slate. Rather than refining the abstract direction, I went back to the briefing document and found something more specific to build from: the event's London setting. With the conference title already nodding to the capital, it made sense to lean into that and bring the city itself into the creative. The result was a design built around the London skyline, masked into a wave shape that introduced the colours that had resonated in the previous round while making the new visual more interesting and dynamic.
I also created a document with all the elements used in the branding so that it could be shared with our external suppliers and also with some of the internal stakeholders, as a summary of the event branding and what we can do in terms of collateral and deliverables.
By this point I was getting a bit obsessed with the gradient and this is my very, very rough attempt at showing how I wanted to use it on that arcade screen. It was part of my briefing document to the animation studio, in an attempt to explain what I meant when I kept saying "I want the gradient to take over the space, Andy!" Thankfully, Andy and his partner did a much better job.
