Roles: Creative Direction, Conceptualisation, Graphic Design, Illustration,
The Briefs
As part of an ongoing series of events that evolved from the WTF is Cloud Native brand, online and in-person conferences were organised around the topic of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). These happened in 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively.
The inaugural conference played heavily on references to fire fighting as a reference to SRE addressing the challenge of engineers persistently having to 'put out fires' when software is deployed. I was asked to build upon this theme and was assigned the task of conceptualising, illustrating, and designing a website, graphic assets, and promotional items for the first conference then acted as creative director and occasional illustrator for the second.
A large number of assets were designed for both conferences including web layout, and promotional campaigns, A large number of assets were designed, including web layout, paid promotional campaigns, animated content and swag.
The Briefs
As part of an ongoing series of events that evolved from the WTF is Cloud Native brand, online and in-person conferences were organised around the topic of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). These happened in 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively.
The inaugural conference played heavily on references to fire fighting as a reference to SRE addressing the challenge of engineers persistently having to 'put out fires' when software is deployed. I was asked to build upon this theme and was assigned the task of conceptualising, illustrating, and designing a website, graphic assets, and promotional items for the first conference then acted as creative director and occasional illustrator for the second.
A large number of assets were designed for both conferences including web layout, and promotional campaigns, A large number of assets were designed, including web layout, paid promotional campaigns, animated content and swag.
Character set and selection of work produced for the WTF is SRE 22'
The 2022 Virtual Conference
I employed a heavily narrative approach centred on the machine under attack' It featured an engineering plant (the machine), symbolising poorly built production software, and the creation of a diverse cast of characters to facilitate storytelling around the central scene.
The attack on the machine was portrayed through the antagonistic characters of imps starting fires with matches (representing the persistent problems that demand constant time and attention) and a dragon representing a catastrophic event (such as a Black Friday website outage). The protagonists were Chris (a C-level executive) who is under fire for his systems going down and Grace a software engineer who is exhausted from fighting fires and wants to flee the machine and the company that runs it. Additionally, an SRE'copter was introduced to extinguish fires and provided a visual hook to sell the benefits of SRE to entice people to the conference. This was built using the WTF brand logo transformed into a 3D helicopter, thus connecting back to the core brand and the theme of the conference.
The conference was a huge success with around 4000 signups and 2000 attendees on the day. Given this was a virtual conference during the event saturate year of COVID lockdowns this was certainly a real achievement.
I employed a heavily narrative approach centred on the machine under attack' It featured an engineering plant (the machine), symbolising poorly built production software, and the creation of a diverse cast of characters to facilitate storytelling around the central scene.
The attack on the machine was portrayed through the antagonistic characters of imps starting fires with matches (representing the persistent problems that demand constant time and attention) and a dragon representing a catastrophic event (such as a Black Friday website outage). The protagonists were Chris (a C-level executive) who is under fire for his systems going down and Grace a software engineer who is exhausted from fighting fires and wants to flee the machine and the company that runs it. Additionally, an SRE'copter was introduced to extinguish fires and provided a visual hook to sell the benefits of SRE to entice people to the conference. This was built using the WTF brand logo transformed into a 3D helicopter, thus connecting back to the core brand and the theme of the conference.
The conference was a huge success with around 4000 signups and 2000 attendees on the day. Given this was a virtual conference during the event saturate year of COVID lockdowns this was certainly a real achievement.
The 2023 In-Person Conference - London
Following the success of the 2022 conference, another event was organised in 2023. Here we built upon the themes and character that had proved so successful the year before. I was asked to conceptualise, illustrate and give art direction to a freelance illustrator to produce an iterative conference design that built upon my character set.
Following the success of the 2022 conference, another event was organised in 2023. Here we built upon the themes and character that had proved so successful the year before. I was asked to conceptualise, illustrate and give art direction to a freelance illustrator to produce an iterative conference design that built upon my character set.
Examples of Character story telling set within the conference and web design
The conference was held in London so we transported the chaos of the SRE world to the London Skyline and utilised the stereotypes of British Culture in a very tongue-in-cheek way. The SRE dragon was now recognised as the official mascot for the conference with a really strong image of the dragon climbing the shard similar to King Kong. The imps were secondary mascots who were again used to tell stories both in collateral and within the venue.
