HC PPMD Leadership Summit · Austin, TX · August 2025
Bringing
a Brand
to Life.
300 leaders. 3 days. Plexiglass sculptures,
animal generators & 20′ wall posters.
300 leaders. 3 days. Plexiglass sculptures,
animal generators & 20′ wall posters.
300 leaders. The first Human Capital summit in three years. The stakes were high — and the brief was anything but ordinary.
I was asked to design the visual brand and overall event experience for the 2025 HC PPMD Leadership Summit — bringing together Principals, Partners and Managing Directors for 3 days of programming at the JW Marriott in Austin, TX.
This was not a typical brand project. The venue was an entire floor of the hotel. Deliverables ranged from cocktail coasters to plexiglass sculptures to 20-foot ambition animal posters. "Keeping it weird" was baked into the brief.
Before a single pixel was designed, we sat with the Leader of Human Capital Consulting for 30 minutes. What emerged was a brief built entirely from honest conversation.
Opportunities lie in the space between.
We pulled together 3 initial concept boards based on the 30-minute interview. We prepared visual representations of the vision and mission, and considered how the brand would enter the space and live in the attendee experience.
We experimented with HC as an event mark — thinking forward about signage and stage elements, and how to bring Human Capital to life as a visual symbol in physical space.
Our theme anchors on interesting mashups — WTF combinations that make you look twice. The Zebra Goldfish. Weird, memorable, and impossible to ignore.
A collection of branded visuals pulling the theme together across every channel — ensuring a consistent, immersive experience from registration to close-out.
We anchored on bold visual mashups paired with strong leadership commands — working with leadership to create statements that would provoke action
Pre-event: teasing the experience and driving registration · Day-of: mobile-friendly live agenda with full session details
of the following period's sales target.
One of our greatest challenges was designing an environment without physically being in it. Floor plans and virtual tours are valuable, but nothing prepares you for actual scale. The quantity and variety of materials needed to make a large conference floor feel intentionally branded was significant — careful budgeting meant choosing investment in high-impact pieces over a broader spread of lower-quality touches.
The 30-minute interview with the HC leader gave us everything we needed. The best creative briefs aren't documents — they're conversations. The words "inflection point," "collective opportunity," and "PRIDE" shaped every design decision that followed. Starting with listening, not assumptions, is what made the final work feel true to the moment.
Every environmental detail — coasters, decals, signage — was an opportunity to reinforce the theme and nudge behavior. When the brand is embedded in the physical experience, attendees don't just see it. They feel it. That's what makes a conference memorable rather than forgettable, and what turns a leadership event into an actual inflection point.
Plexiglass animals and 20-foot mashup posters could easily read as gimmick. What kept it grounded was that every unexpected choice traced back to the theme: opportunities at unexpected intersections. The weirdness had intent. That's the difference between a novelty and a brand statement.