KC Design Week 2024 / Identity, 3D, motion
An identity built to be played with.
One mark for Kansas City's whole design community, built from the materials of every discipline it brings together.
Client: KC Design Week 2024
Role: creative direction, 3D, motion and AR. With: Skyler Baker, graphic design and illustration.
Shipped: identity, 3D glyph system, web header, tickets, social and AR.
The whole system in under a minute.
One cut of the identity: the mark assembles, cycles through every material, then carries into the header, the tile system, the glass ticket and the launch.
Inside the glyph world.
The identity becomes a place you can move through. Glass, chrome and jelly turn the same family of glyphs into a changing field of colour, reflection and depth.
Close views reveal individual materials. Wider views bring the pieces back together as one shared world.
Twelve pieces. Twelve materials. One wordmark.
The identity film takes the idea literally. Each piece of the wordmark arrives from a different discipline's material and clicks into place, left to right, until the mark is whole.
One mark, every discipline.
Then every glyph got weight. Brick for architecture, clover and moss for landscape, metal for industrial, tinted glass for graphic design. The same wordmark, in the materials of the people who come to the week.
The glyphs tumble together and lock into the wordmark.
The website video header assembled the system in motion. The site launched on March 18, 2024, with the identity carried through the launch cards, event poster and social posts.
Admit one, in glass.
Tickets got their own treatment: glowing glass passes that switched on as sales opened, followed by campaign updates.
Every speaker, every event, one kit.
Black-and-white portraits (no colourisation, by brief), colour chips in Work Sans, a glyph or two, the evergreen logo and the date. The same kit scaled from Instagram to the speaker screens and the side scrims.
Explore the social system
How we got there.
KC Design Week gets a new identity every year. The brand has to speak to the whole community at once, work across social, banners, slides and a website reskin, and carry the evergreen KCDW logo in every piece.
Three visual directions led to a flat graphic system, then a material world with room for every discipline.
The 2026 expansion returned to the original scenes, extending the strongest glass passes and adding cameras inside the settled glyph field.
Explore the supporting work
Five Instagram effects put the identity in your hands.
Five Instagram effects explored the identity as world objects, face decoration, an object reveal and an animated sticker. The original effects are now archived.
The system, out in the world.
A compact set of motion and still formats brings the identity into the feed.
Explore the social system
Made together.
Mason Barry / Barry Creative: creative direction, 3D, motion and AR.
Skyler Baker: graphic design and illustration.
Client: KC Design Week 2024.