Develop a proposal for a one-day symposium targeting post-millennials with the goal of educating, engaging, and inspiring the next generation of designers. Due to the “stay at home” mandates because of COVID-19, this was planned as a virtual symposium. As long as I met the goal, the client left it up to me to decide on the actual message I wanted to communicate to the users or audience. The event was open to everyone interested; however, it was to be promoted to the post-millennials interested in art and design, especially those in high school. The client’s vision was quite ambitious for this one-day event, stating, “think of SXSW (South by Southwest), Coachella—think MEMORABLE and EPIC!” I spared no expense because this was a fictional project and had no budget. [Obviously, in the real world, that would be a major constraint that should be taken into account.]

Client

AIGA, the professional organization for design (formerly known as the American Institute of Graphic Arts).

Target Audience

Post-Millennials, a.k.a. Generation Z (Gen Z) — roughly those born between 1995 and 2010.

Digital natives
More likely to be in college than in the workforce
43% more likely than Millennials to live with a college-educated parent

Since some Post-Millennials were as young as 10 years of age (at the time this project was started), their parents and educators were also considered as part of the target audience since they could still influence the younger Gen Z. Parents (Millennials) that are college-educated are familiar with the process of enrolling in college and what college life entails. They are probably going to guide their children in that process as they grow up.

Mockup showing a horizontal layout for a conference program

The Logo

Meaning

It symbolizes what we want Fuse Symposium to represent: bringing people and ideas together to create something new, hence the shape; the circles coming together are reminiscent of nuclear fusion — “a process in which two nuclei join to form a larger nucleus, thereby giving off energy. Nuclear fusion is the energy source which causes stars to ‘shine’, and hydrogen bombs to explode.”

The translucence shows that bringing diverse people together helps create new interactions and ideas, as represented by the colors created when the circles overlap.