About This Project
The Brief
When the University of Niagara Falls Canada secured its TEDx license, the stakes for the visual identity were immediately clear: TED’s brand standards are among the most tightly governed in the events world, and a first-time licensee operates under particular scrutiny. A breach of those standards risks the license itself. The creative challenge wasn’t just to make the event look good — it was to make it feel distinctive and ownable while working in complete fidelity to a system we didn’t control.
The Approach: Working Within the System
The decision to stay close to TEDx’s iconic visual language for this inaugural event was a deliberate strategic call. TED’s black, red, and white palette is globally recognized — leaning into it rather than pushing against it gave the event immediate credibility and signalled to attendees that UNF understood the weight of the brand it had been trusted with.
Within those constraints, the creative found its expression through the event theme: Digital Mosaics: Narratives That Transform Tomorrow. The visual identity was built around abstract pixels cascading at varying scales — a motif that felt both conceptually aligned with the theme and visually dynamic across print, digital, and environmental applications. The result was a system that felt unmistakably TEDx and unmistakably intentional.
Creative Deliverables
Speaker Presentation Templates: Custom PowerPoint templates gave speakers a polished, on-brand canvas for their talks, ensuring visual consistency on stage while allowing individual content to breathe.
Organic Social Media Campaign: Working with the Associate Director of Marketing to identify content needs, I developed the full suite of social media templates for the pre-event campaign. The junior designer then populated the templates with speaker names, talk titles, and scheduling information — a clean division of labour that maintained creative consistency while scaling production efficiently.
Event Badges: Personalized plastic badges were produced for every attendee, speaker, staff member, and volunteer, each printed with the individual’s name rather than left generic or handwritten. A small detail with an outsized impact: the badges became an unexpected social moment, with attendees photographing their TEDxUNF credentials as a keepsake and sharing them organically.
Speaker & Exhibitor Toolkits: Personalized social media kits were developed for both speakers and exhibitors — ready-to-post graphics they could share across their own channels to announce their participation.
Microsite Visual Identity: The visual system I developed was subsequently adopted by the digital marketing team as the foundation for the TEDxUNF microsite, a natural extension of the identity into a digital-first environment that brought the cascade pixel motif to a wider audience in the lead-up to the event.