Redefining Luxury

Visual identity

The Redefining Luxury 2018 Conference is a series of public programs, workshops, and events hosted by Parsons School of Design to explore current and future notions of luxury.

The presentation of this project has been edited and fashioned according to the designer’s original intent and does not represent the official conference.

While working at We-Designs LLC in New York City, under the supervision of Wendy Fok, I was part of the design team with Erin Lee Carman. We were tasked to design visual assets for the conference including event posters and name tags. I advocated to establish a visual identity system that worked cohesively with every designed element and touch point of the conference. Further consideration was made for this conference to me an annually reoccurring event.

In the ideation phase of the conference's logo, my intent was to translate the evolving notions of luxury as well as the changing landscape of what has been traditionally accepted as Luxury. Personally for my design process, regardless of the medium, I always starts with choosing the right fonts to work with. I wanted to reflect the evolving nature of Luxury today by straying away from the traditionally safe-but-generic use of large serif fonts. I also did not want to jump on the bandwagon of the trend of Luxury brands making logo revamps that follow the same uncanny format– From large expressive serifs to minimal sans serifs. With the logo, my idea was to treat the X of “Luxury” as a metaphorical slider that you could drag left and right to reveal the logo in different fonts.

The decision making for the color scheme and brand motif came together nicely. The team had the idea of fashioning the event flyer as an interactive origami piece for attendees of the event to interact with, accompanied by illustrated step by step instructions on the bottom right of the poster. I enjoyed how the instructional geometrical drawings of the origami when tiles together created a seamless repeated pattern. I then selected a color scheme that included multiple hue of the same color, as well as an additional accent color, and utilized that as a visual metaphor of how the lines are now blurred between what is and isn’t considered Luxury today.