EmTech MIT is MIT Technology Review’s flagship conference: three days at the MIT Media Lab where innovators and business leaders discuss the year’s breakthrough technologies. After the company’s rebrand with Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, I was put in charge of updating the look and feel of the entire events portfolio, starting with EmTech MIT.
The result
Record social media impressions and website visits for the event, a system a team of non-designers could run on their own, and a brand that was adopted across the entire MIT Technology Review events portfolio and by international presenters worldwide.
Disciplines
Art direction, branding, content strategy, copywriting, design, motion design
Deliverables
Brand guidelines, print ads, banner ads, landing page template, email templates, Powerpoint templates, on-site signage and collateral
Collaborators
Eric Mongeon
Background and research
The challenge: EmTech MIT had been through many brand iterations, and the new identity had to build on that history rather than erase it. The trademark red and the square brick were staying. The job was to turn a handful of fixed elements into a complete, flexible brand for everything from magazine ads to stage projections, and to make it simple enough that a team without designers could keep it consistent after I handed it over.
Examples of older creative
Starting with what couldn’t change: Before designing anything new, I gathered everything that was already decided: the updated logo, the color palette, and the new institutional typeface. These weren’t constraints to work around. They were the foundation, and it was clear from the start that the logo, the color, and the type were all I had to build on.
Existing creative assets
Enter the wave
The animated EmTech Wave
Those three elements made a recognizable but limited toolbox. The brand needed one more ingredient that was distinctly its own, something to tie every format together.
That ingredient was the wave. It represents the ever-changing, evolving technological landscape and the conference’s position at the forefront of emerging technologies. It gives the givens a visual distinction, and it works as a mnemonic across every execution of the brand. I created a palette of static waves to bring visual variety to print, and the same waves move in digital.
One toolbox, many executions
Magazine spread advertisement
With the toolbox settled, I could build a suite of distinctive collateral and advertising quickly and consistently. A key decision was applying a simple color wash to photography. The photos come from many different sources, and the wash makes them read as one family instead of a collection of stock images.
Magazine advertisements
Rethinking the website
The old website was built for people who had already bought tickets, so its focus was education. I redesigned the template to do a different job: win over people who hadn’t bought yet.
That meant reordering the page around who it was speaking to. Content that matters only once you’re attending, like venue details and the full agenda, moved to sub-pages or was de-emphasized. Content that persuades the undecided moved to the front: thematic language, star speakers, and pull quotes. I also made the ticket-buying path clearer and treated mobile as an equal experience to desktop, not an afterthought.
Beyond the page
A conference brand lives in more places than magazines and websites, so the system had to work across social, motion, and the physical venue.
Instagram stories
Instagram stories
Animated logo
Onsite modular signage system
Built for a team of non-designers
Projection design
“Kyle standardized the look and feel of our designs, and he created assets that were user-friendly and allowed us (a team of non designers!) to scale and update as needed.”
—Nicole Silva, MIT Technology Review Director of events
The system only works if the people running the events can use it, so I built it to be used without me: brand guidelines, plus templates for the landing page, email, and PowerPoint that anyone on the team could update and scale.
Results and impact
After the new EmTech brand launched, social media impressions and website visits for the event reached record highs.
The success of the branding carried over to the rest of the portfolio. The system was extended to EmTech Next, EmTech Digital, and Future Compute, and I developed localized brand standards guides for international presenters of all of these events around the globe.
Work done while in-house at MIT Technology Review.