Celebrating Design Culture in our Hometown
Hyperquake teamed up with AIGA Cincinnati to visualize Cincinnati Design Week, an annual creative celebration for the entire design community.
A week of creative collaboration.
AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, is a national organization comprising 25,000 diverse members in 70 chapters, representing a broad spectrum of design-related fields. The AIGA focuses on advancing professional design practices, developing strategic processes, and enhancing the impact of design for the future. Over the years, our team at Hyperquake has developed a strong relationship with our friends at the AIGA Cincinnati chapter through its many events and initiatives.
This year, Hyperquake was lucky to partner with AIGA Cincinnati to brand their largest annual event: Cincinnati Design Week. The week is bursting with creative challenges, panel discussions, insightful workshops, and speakers, curated with the intention to inspire deeper connections within the local design community. We were challenged to create a design that would provoke designers, strategists, and project managers alike to participate in the week’s excitement.
An identity based on community.
For our first full-team project since Hyperquake’s agency rebrand, our entire design team huddled up to brainstorm fresh ways to bring CDW 2016 to life. The whole gang gathered at the home of one of our senior designers; we ordered pizza, grabbed some beers, and got to work organizing our thoughts and inspiration to create a meaningful set of design themes to share with the AIGA Cincinnati board.
Since Design Week celebrates collaboration within the creative community, we developed these themes to reflect the many people and resources that intertwine to create this productive environment. Hyperquake saw the opportunity to translate these principles into dynamic, layered visuals, built on top of one another to represent our multi-talented community.
Allowing craft to do the talking.
Facing an audience of designers, the CDW identity had to move beyond the ordinary. Hyperquake quickly got to cutting, layering, and hand-crafting the final looks for Cincinnati Design Week, allowing texture and depth to be the driver of the design. By photographing hand-cut elements and adding details post-photoshoot, we were able to mesh the digital and physical worlds of design, hoping to encourage makers of all kinds to explore methods and combine practices.
Relying on foundations to inspire our peers.
Ultimately, the CDW 2016 branding speaks a language that all designers can understand: dots as halftones, small grids as pixels, basic shapes and colors–all elements from a designer’s foundational toolbox, combining to create a larger story. Similar to the way these foundational graphics work together, the creative community in Cincinnati is strengthened by collaboration between designers and makers who each contribute their own talents and attributes toward a greater vision.
Years worth of knowledge wrapped up in one week.
The week was packed with amazing talent and insight—ranging from virtual realities to printing processes, and coming from presenters like Gaslight, Mohawk, and Alex Center, to name a few. Hyperquake was honored to be included in the mix of presenters, hosting a collaborative workshop of our own to help the AIGA better serve its members, and to help designers take better advantage of their membership.
Being part of AIGA and using design as a catalyst for growth within our community is important to the team here at Hyperquake, and we love having the opportunity to connect with and inspire the talent in our city. We’re grateful for the opportunity AIGA Cincinnati has given us this year, and we’re excited for what’s to come as our design community grows.
