Purpose 2018

After the success of the second Purpose conference, myself and the Wildwon team (armed with many post-it notes and sharpies) took to our co-working space meeting room to plan an exciting long term vision for Purpose into 2018 and the future.

Setting foundations

Looking at the past to build the future of Purpose

Over the years parts of the Purpose brand had established themselves as foundational elements, creating a connection between each Purpose event. The stacked Purpose copy with sketchy underline, the combination of Proxima Nova and Georgia Italic as the primary fonts - these elements are at the heart of the Purpose brand. When creating the style guide for 2018 these features remained unchanged for familiarity and consistency.

Sally Hill, co-founder of Purpose, curates the program for the event based on topics and themes that evolve year on year. It was her vision that the main suite of graphics change annually to reflect the themes of that year. 2018 themes included 'The Ethics of Exponential Tech', 'Mental Health and Human Well-being' and 'Systems Change and the New Economy'

Another consideration for the brand was drawing a stronger link between Wildwon and Purpose. Research in this area had showed that many attendees were unaware that this was Wildwon's flagship event. The solution involved creating more similarities between the two brands and linking them in our social media campaigns. Visually, uniting the brands involved including the same cream base colour, using the same typeface families and more frequently using the 'crafted by Wildwon' logo on Purpose branded items for cross-promotion.

Relaunching purpose.do

More than a conference website

During the process of updating the Purpose brand, it became clear we needed to rethink the exisiting purpose.do website. The consensus was that in two short years we had outgrown the site, and that it wasn't easy to update to suit our growing needs. We wanted purpose.do to be more than just a conference site to be forgotten post event. 

We envisioned a hub of information, video content and blog posts by influential speakers to be updated in between our yearly conferences. A section for our growing community, and pages for our partners to explain their own purpose-driven mission. Lucky for us, during the early stages of the project we were approached by two graduating General Assembly students to help us with our website audit - this helped us to identify our audiences more clearly and tweak our existing persona's and added great insight on the website's functionality from an outsiders perspective.

Social Media Campaign

Extending the reach of Purpose

In 2018 we accelerated our social media marketing campaign exponentially on previous years. With major headline speakers Paul Hawken (Environmentalist and Author of 'Drawndown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming') and Rachel Botsman (Author 'Who Can You Trust?') confirmed, I created custom graphics to promote the conference and all of our amazing speakers across Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.

Elements and textures of the four illustrations that made up this years brand were used in a variety of different ways throughout the campaign, with animations being used for the first time across all platforms.

Bringing the brand to life

Transforming Commune into the Purpose Precinct for 2018

As in previous years, every detail of the 2 day event at Commune was meticulously planned by Sally, myself and the Wildwon team.

The four 'ecosystems' of our brand became the four key areas to explore in the Commune at Waterloo. With the help of the talented team at Amigo and Amigo, the main stage was transformed into a larger than life representation of the Purpose Lake, complete with glowing moon.

Our secondary stage and workshop area's became the Purpose Desert and Beach, and in lieu of a green space (like last years Reservoir in Paddington), we transported hundreds of plants into the Commune garage so our attendees would have a quiet area between sessions. We called it 'The Green Garage' and created souvenir pins for our guests to encourage moments of reflection on the often heavy topics in the programming.

The A5 program, a mainstay of the event included all 70 speakers, the detailed two day program and ads for the many sponsors of Purpose.

Once again our fantastic volunteers wore custom designed shirts, and our Meet Pat stations were also adorned with the branding.