This was a large cross-functional effort across many teams and leaders. I led the visual design and branding. Project names, details, and metrics have been anonymized where needed.
Designing for the audience beyond the room
The summit brought together 300 leaders who would eventually take a new strategy back to an engineering organization of 12,000 people.
That made the audience bigger than the room itself. The visual design needed to help leaders absorb the strategy during the event and make it easier for them to share the important ideas afterward.
It also had to work for a highly technical audience. We couldn't remove the complexity, but we could give it structure.
Working with leadership, communications, and the broader event team, I focused on making the hierarchy of the story visible.
What needed to land immediately? What needed more explanation? What belonged in supporting material? How could the same visual language hold together across different speakers, subjects, and parts of the event?
The goal wasn't to make the strategy simpler. It was to make it easier to absorb.
Visualizing strategy and transformation
I created a new identity for the summit using gradients based on Google's new brighter brand colors. The central shape could remain recognizable from year to year while the colors evolved. A design colleague introduced the idea of origami, which I incorporated into the icon system.
1. Finding the visual hierarchy
I worked with leadership and their communications teams as they refined the story, helping turn dense technical material into presentations with a clear hierarchy.
The main ideas needed to be immediately visible, while the technical depth still had to be there for an audience that cared about the details.
2. Building a visual language
I created a new identity for the summit using gradients based on Google's brand colors. The central shape could remain recognizable from year to year while the colors evolved. A design colleague introduced the idea of origami, which I incorporated into the icon system.
For technical material, simple visual relationships, recurring shapes, contrast, and color helped people see how ideas and systems related to one another.
The same visual language could then extend across presentations, event graphics, and the materials leaders used afterward.
3. Designing beyond the screen
The visual experience extended into the physical event as well. Working with a design colleague and the broader event team, we developed wayfinding, campus signage, circular seating areas, and an audio-guided walking experience that encouraged people to move around and talk between sessions.
The thought process
An event isn’t only what happens on stage. People need time and space to process what they’ve heard, compare notes, ask questions, and make connections. The planning team designed the moments between sessions as deliberately as the sessions themselves, giving people reasons to move, talk, and spend time together.
The presentation system was part of a broader event style guide that helped keep a large, multi-speaker event visually consistent.
I created high-contrast layouts that worked across large conference screens and smaller displays, along with templates that could be reused as the strategy moved through the organization.
