Shopify Summit 2020
Branding, Event Design
Every year, Shopify's 6,000 employees gather en masse at this conference in cities across the world (in 2020: Ottawa, Toronto, and Berlin). The goal is to hear from leadership about the upcoming year's goals and projects and to connect with fellow coworkers. I work as a Senior Designer on Shopify's Culture Design team, and branding this conference is one of our biggest projects of the year. It's a massive undertaking with complex considerations, as the conference takes place in multiple cities/venues as well as on a remote livestream.
Though Shopify is a big company, it's anything but traditional or corporate. Summit 2020's visual theme is designed to reflect the company's ambitious, playful, and get-shit-done attitude. Graphic devices such as scribbles, grid patterns, experimental typography, paper rips, etc. made for a modular yet expressive system that worked well in all contexts.
Our team designed a series of posters that could be pasted up around each venue. They were also made available as free digital downloads for attendees to print or use as desktop/phone backgrounds.
Everything at the event was designed to be as eco-friendly as possible, including the name badges. Attendees could customize their badges and notebooks at Personalization Stations that were strategically placed around each venue.
One of the conference's goals is to facilitate interaction between employees who may have never met before. In the spirit of a internal icebreaker program called Sidekicks, we created an activation that allowed attendees to speed meet someone new. I designed a deck of icebreaker questions to help facilitate the experience.
This project was designed collaboratively with the rest of my team at Shopify: Mandira Midha, Rachel Lin, Meg Rosen, Syd Selch, and Dom Richichi.
My role on the team was as a senior designer, and my tasks included: being part of the event’s core planning team, collaborating with the rest of the design team on the brand guidelines, and designing the presentation deck template, several posters, the design station activation, and the Sidekicks card deck.
