UR2020

Understanding Risk Global forum 2020

A great honour to be a member of the dream team(s) on this one… As creative director, I was responsible for the overall creative and artistic vision for the Understanding risk community’s global Identity and in particular for the UR2020 forum.
I’ve divided the page into 3 main parts, pre and post Covid. Allot of work took place over the period, Let’s start with how UR2020 ended up, the final outcome, a global conference reaching out to over 5000 attendees. It wasn’t a pivot moving from a physical in-person conference in Singapore, we were swinging!

Tasks

  • Creative direction
  • Project strategy
  • Platform design

Part (iii) 

For UR2020 forums’ pivot, I was involved in the whole transformation, project planning, procurement, the creation of the format we finally used. Studying  platforms which suited our needs best? The design of a Global agenda. 

With a great team I took care of everything visual, the colour of each line on the platform, on-screen graphics, holding screens, video storyboarding; trying essentially to hold it down to a Crisp UR identity. 

tell me about this
Having set out visual guidelines, all media produced followed these principles. A Clean and crisp identity backed with powerful community based and satellite imagery.

Working with such tight deadlines, essentially to make a long story short, once the project was signed off we had less than 50% of planned production time. It was a real pleasure working with the Smyle curation and motion graphics teams, they really pulled together a marvelous job, capturing the Community’s energy realized during the 3 days. 

 

A glimpse of the planned timeline, in an ideal world.

The pivot made us set up a whole new strategy, studying online behaviors, learning new platforms, their Pro’s and Con’s. Going global let us take the location and bring it to your finger tips. UR2020 now had a Global audience, and we had to design and develop an agenda to suit, operating in 3 time zones.

 

There was a big learning curve for all involved, setting up your in-home kit, instructing session leads to adjusting presentations from 40 minutes to 15 minutes. How to present with no feedback from a physical audience, and all the rest. 

 

Due to the rapidly changing environment we set up a social strategy that was drip fed into the social channels, moving from global myths of disaster story telling, LOOKING back, LOOKING forward, pushed the language of the campaign. 

 

All Agenda items had a tagging system to allow users search by theme and key word, the tags work for both the UR2020 Event platform and the Understandrisk WordPress site. UR2020 hosted 138 hours of content over three days with 534 speakers in 120 sessions. 

 

Part (ii) 

The UR2020 pre Covid plan, the initial location was to be the city of Singapore, ‘History, Foresight, Vision, was the main theme, while in the production phase we were pushing a Zero waste strategy which was proving to be a real challenge, but gained great momentum during the inception phase. 

The initial project involved designing a conference for +/- delegates to be carried out over 5 days at the SingEx venue, Singapore. We were endeavoring to set out a new standard in creating a fully ZERO waste Conference. Working with local maker labs a modular concept was being developed using a full circle design process.

 

Part (i) Design from 1st principles

Starting out in 2019 with the Goal of UR2020 in our vision, regional, National and themed conferences were happening around the world. To help with these we set out a visual Guideline archive, giving access to all UR visual content, that gave clear instruction in how to use UR content, but still allowed them be creative. 

 

The initial analysis looked at the UR banners, and how to standardize them for global use.
Breaking down the origin of UR logo to first principles, allows us to add formal literacy, providing balance, making the logo easier to apply in different scenarios.

From the inception of UR global forums a number of satellite events spawned from the initiative. UR was growing rapidly around the globe, there we’re a number of iterations of the UR icon and it was becoming inconsistent from event to event. To prevent this we created a full set of visual guidelines to maintain the UR visual identity. Something I have generally followed through out my career, a great joy working with Miki Fernandez on these who has been the Master behind the UR identity since its inception. 

 

Some simple examples of how we set out the guidelines, these helped organizers in carrying out their own UR events. These are only some of the highlights of a very large project, please if you have any questions or queries, just drop me a line. 

 

Thank you