The Brief
As part of continued events and content marketing campaigns to promote Cloud Native practices, Container Solutions organised a virtual conference to be held online in April 2021. The brief asked for an engaging original concept and design to attract sign-ups, and sponsors as well as form a narrative platform from which to build the three speaker tracks of 'culture', 'technology', and 'people'. The solution needed to be bold, playful, and represent both Cloud Native technology, culture, and community. It had to stand out from the saturated market of 'boring tech conferences'.
I was asked to be the creative director, designer, and illustrator for the project, producing every asset for the conference ranging from initial creative conceptualisation, character designs, website design, SWAG, social media assets, and animated content.
My Solution
Having worked with various software Engineers for some time and researching various software social media channels I understood the audience's love of whimsy and playfulness and used this to create an isometric planet festival park in order to represent the Cloud Native tech space and community within it. Each part of the world was themed around each of the conference tracks of 'People', 'Culture', and 'Technology'. The design took some visual queues from one strategy games and the work of M.C. Escher. Here the idea was to fuse the playfulness of colour, comics, and gaming with strict isometric perfection, echoing the heavily technical aspect of Cloud-based software development and the playfulness of the cloud loosely knit community.
Website Design
The isometric Cloud Native world was designed specifically with the website in mind, providing a fully illustrated backdrop from which users could be taken on a fantasy journey to explain each aspect of the event's tracks, content, and speakers
Users entered a landing page where they entered the world and then scrolled up through the landscape visiting various 'stops' along the way. Each stop explained each of the tracks through the use of the landscape and one of the central characters. In order to retain the consistency of storytelling a mobile-friendly version was also created which created large cloud areas between each section to explain each stop on the journey.
Promotional Items
The characters and world we used them to tell stories within the narrative of the Cloud Native Planet and used them as post-event promotional SWAG items with the characters being used to create t-shirts, laptop stickers and limited edition promotional posters.
