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.
One week. Every kind of designer in the city.
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.
We pitched three looks.
Three moodboards for the exec committee: a wobbly illustrated world, a system of bold shapes and structured type, and a crafted typographic direction. Building Blocks won.
Alongside the boards, three 3D concepts: Material Synergy (a mosaic of each profession's materials), Design Avatars and Design Polyhedra (a shape per discipline converging into one structure). The final system took a piece of two: a shape for every discipline, a material for every shape.
It starts flat.
A kaleidoscope of abstract shapes and modular icons, each one a different perspective, converging into the mark. The glyph wordmark, sixteen icons, Work Sans, and five colours. 2D system, glyphs and illustration by Skyler Baker.
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.
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.
The best seconds of 2024, given room to breathe.
The 2024 campaign cut between locked-off telephoto cameras and used two or three seconds of each. We went back into the original scenes, found the strongest passes (the macro glass wall, the jelly clover, the full glyph field) and rendered them at full length with a slow drift, so the material gets to do the talking.
The 2024 header only ever saw the glyph field from two locked positions. For 2026 we put four new cameras inside the settled field itself, rendered with the original recipe: a slow orbit, a low angle through the thick of it, a push and a top-down macro.
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.
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.
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 case study, cut for the feed.
A ten-slide carousel, two reels, a story set and a 15-second sizzle, all from the faithful 2026 passes. The flat system does the work on top: the wordmark builds letter by letter, brand-colour wipes carry a glyph into every beat, lower-thirds slide in set in Work Sans, and an animated end card closes each piece.
Made together.
Mason Barry / Barry Creative: creative direction, 3D, motion and AR.
Skyler Baker: graphic design and illustration.
Client: KC Design Week 2024.