Pinterest 2019 Leadership Conference:
Lead the Way
Everyone’s favorite source of inspiration, Pinterest, needed design help for their annual Leadership Conference. With the event only a week away, we needed to work fast. In two days, I designed and produced all of the attendee name tags and artwork for posters to decorate the event space. The designs consisted of a mix of bold and soft, muted tones and organic shapes and abstract visuals. Pinterest was so happy with the results that they returned looking for help with even more designs for their leadership conference the following year.
First up was the name tag design. The people attending this conference were leaders across all departments at Pinterest including Product, Engineering, Design, Legal, People, and all the executive employees. I decided to use all the colors in the palette to represent the various departments and act as a quick visual indicator for the attendees when viewing someone’s name tag.
The details above and below each attendees name and department are part of the conference logo sans text, which is two arrows, at different angles and slightly repositioned. I didn’t want the arrows to stand out too much on the name tag, so I decided on two complementary accent colors and transparent white for a little added dimension. One side of the name tag listed the person's name and department, while the other side had the conference logo.
Pinterest also provided our team with a list of inspirational quotes that their employees had individually picked out. My second task was to come up with the visuals that would represent each of these quotes and design a poster for each. My general strategy was to pick out a word in each quote that I felt could be represented well visually. For instance, one of the posters had the quote “Managers light a fire under people; leaders light a fire in people.” I focused on the word “fire” and designed a flame for that quote’s poster.
A few quotes spoke to things that weren’t exactly tangible such as the quote, “Our lives begin to end the moment we become silent about the things that matter.” For this quote I wanted to represent a life ending and silence. I realized that a person’s pulse as shown on a heart rate monitor is very similar to how a sound wave might look. The graphic on that poster could represent both a flatlining heart rate, or a sound easing into silence. Each poster included a quote and its speaker, respective graphic elements and the name of the employee who chose the quote.
