Square Unboxed 2022
Unboxed is Square Developer’s annual conference that aims to connect with their partner and developer audience. Whereas in the past, the event branding had felt like Square overall, this year we wanted to create a look and feel more attuned to the developer audience.
The Associate Creative Director established that we would use colorful gradients and explore playful typography. I took that broad direction and explored its limits:
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.
ROLE: Lead Designer
WORKING GROUP: 2 ACDs, copywriter, 1 designer, production designer
COLLABORATED WITH: PMMs, Developer Advocates, Square Leadership, external vendors
DURATION: December 2021 – May 2022
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.
