Square Unboxed 2022
Unboxed is Square Developer’s annual conference bringing together their partners and developers, which our creative team brands and executes. In 2022, we decided that instead of entirely reinventing the wheel with the brand, we would reskin the previous layouts and design structure with something more vibrant, and more tailored specifically to our developer audience.
Associate Creative Director Lauren Schonzeit established the idea to flip the previous branding to dark mode, and apply gradients to the background and glyphs, and then passed the project to me to bring everything to life.
I introduced an animated ticker tape to hold secondary information, developer-centric stickers and typography, and animation to ground the branding in a digitized space while directing users attention to the key details in any given asset.
These qualities — especially the typography, stickers, and animation approach — not only resonated with the audience for this event, but went on to inform our approach to the Square Developer rebrand 2 years later.
PROJECT LEADS: LAUREN SCHONZEIT
& ERIN ROBERT
LEAD DESIGNER: KIRAN PURI
DESIGNER: JARED KITADE
COPYWRITER: KATE CATINELLA
Developer Stickers
I designed dozens of stickers throughout the branding process to be used both as informative tags (ex. date, that the event was virtual, etc.) and as nods to the meme-loving developer community.
The stickers went on to inform the set design of the event, which featured a grey background standing in for a laptop computer, with rotating kinds of stickers
We also included an interactive section at the bottom of our landing page where visitors could engage with the assets, which served as a kind of easter egg on the page.
Scaled Animation
In my early explorations of this branding (video to the right), I introduced two kinds of animation: the ticker tape, which helped us communicate many details about the event while maintaining a clean layout; and the active mouse, which contextualized the branding into a screen, a direct homage to where the developer works.
These early explorations later inspired the animated Keynote presentations, social assets, and the teaser video (below) which we made with an external agency. For this process, I designed the storyboards for the video, collaborating with our copywriter to determine the content, and art directed the agency through animation.
