Sneak Peak into the Event Branding Process

I absolutely love working on event branding because it’s so fun to see all the pieces come together and create an experience. There are so many different ways you can market an event and it’s so important that it all works together as a system. This will help potential participants understand and recognize the brand.

So I just wanted to share an example of the process in branding Madison Chef Week.

STEP 1: MOODBOARD AND SKETCHES

I began with sketches and moodboards, capturing the concept and feel for the event. After presenting three concepts, we settled on one that revolved around the art of plating food.

STEP 2: LOGO AND MAIN ARTWORK

From the initial concepting stage I move into creating the main artwork and imagining how that could work in a system. I usually create this artwork as a poster that other pieces can be built off of. So for this concept I hand lettered the logo and played with the idea of different graphic elements going through the type to represent the plated food. This was a subtle key for the week. Each event had it’s own shape, while still having the consistency of the logo. In event branding there’s so much information to share that needs to be conveyed quickly and visually so by creating this kinetic system with colors and shapes a viewer can quickly begin to understand it.

STEP 3: BRAND BUILD OUT

Once main art is established we can go ahead and build out other collateral based on that one piece. The fun part about events is that they can be so dynamic. Once there is a system in place everything can move around it and make sense. For Chef Week we created pieces such as a passport-like book where each event would have it’s graphic and when attending the event you could get a stamp of the logo over it, tying it back to the poster. We also created images for social media, animations, full calendar cards, a website, ads, and individual menus.

With a kinetic system of design in place participants will get a completely branded experience from marketing to the day-of.