Jacob Waites
I design, prototype, and build brands and interactions full of expressive type, fun motion, bold colors, and minimal line-work. Sometimes I write and speak about design. My craft is the way I speak to the world, I work to help others find their voice and make them successful.
Blueprint Events
Blueprint is IDEO CoLab's annual member event. CoLab convene's industry leaders from around the world to see a glimpse of the future through prototypes that are on display made during the year, talks from leading experts in numerous research fields, and breakout work sessions during the day.
About Blueprint
I developed visual brands and led design for CoLab's annual member events every year from 2016 to 2020 (except for 2019, in which IDEO global took the reigns.) These member events were a place for CoLab and IDEO to showcase our work to existing and prospective members, we would show prototypes and talk about our approach for the year, and build what would become the blueprints for the upcoming year as well.
All of the brand stylings had their own unique themes, but always had a brand library for myself and other designers to reference for the physical space. Other designers and team members definitely shared the workload for implimentation in the physical spaces, blueprint was always a massive team effort to coordinate.
Blueprint 2016
2016’s theme was crosstalk, an electrical engineering phenomenon that occurs when two wires charged with electricity come close enough to one another to arc, creating a visible flash of light and energy. Crosstalk was used as a metaphor to describe CoLab’s unique membership model and sprint process: when putting this industry leaders, engineers, and designers into a single area, the opportunities for collaborative innovation are maximized.
Blueprint 2016 was one of the only CoLab events where we produced a printed book takeaway. A smaller book made it's way back into the rotation later on in 2018.
Blueprint 2017
Vectors were used as a metaphor to describe CoLab’s 2017 initiatives to move our projects forward, and describe our rapidly expanding network, which was soaring to new heights.
2017 Website
2017 Design System
The event branding focused on two spot colors to create a modern, saturated, high contrast space. I created custom illustrations for the event posters, along with takeaway cards for each prototype present at the event. The illustration style for the event was heavily stroke based, and combined the vector forms with line illustrations of different prototypes and portfolio area imagery. Since the color palette was bilaterally split it was simple to create minimal illustrations that spoke to either feature portfolio.
2017 Signage
I designed physical signage for the event in collaboration with Adam Lukasik, who led the industrial design and production of this year’s fixtures. In the end, we created the signage consisted of portfolio wayfinding, prototype housing fixtures, and also decorative elements with laser etched vector graphics and hand-inlayed ink.
2017 Collateral
Blueprint 2018
2018’s theme was spectra, evoking feelings of vibrance and clarity in a diffraction of many different colors. Spectra highlighted CoLab’s shift into many different social impact portfolios, we highlighted key streams in circular economy, dynamic workforce, open financial systems, and collaborative cities.
The event branding featured an array of colors and imagery of diffraction and visual plays on light. The key backdrop was darkness, along with brightly colored photography that was pixel-sorted to create detailed texturing to abstract the images and symbolize CoLab’s lens of tech to see the world.
2018 Website
2018 Design System
The design system for the spectra themed event referenced color gradients and geometric lines and forms, along with pixel sorted imagery and refractive layered text repetition.
Photography Direction Experiments
As a source of inspiration, I studied different forms of light manipulation and diffraction, and set up studio photoshoots using prisms and colored gels under different angles to create abstract imagery for the event visuals.
After the shoot, I wrote a processing script to pixel-sort the images based on luminosity and saturation, turning each image into an even further abstract representation of light. The high quality images were used as texture and backdrops for many of the event’s elements, such as the portfolio posters, some presentation materials, and the interiors of the event book.
Collateral and Event Photos
Blueprint 2020
Happening during the worst year ever, Blueprint 2020 was our only digital blueprint event. The theme this time was new frontiers, where we rolled things back to a black and white technicolor 80s mashup of printed science fiction novels, VHS aesthetics, and futuristic blobs in space.
Blueprint 2020 had a full 24 hours of content, and as such we created a site that integrated with google cal to reserve space in talk sessions around the clock.
2020 Website
2020 Design System
Blueprint 2020's design system went further than ever before, where I created a templated planner document as a shared library across the team. It had controllers for inputting content such as talk images and titles into the web previews for events, and also had zoom background templates and customizable deck slide templates without the need for installing fonts.
It also contained a live updating timeline with multiple timezones for forseeing overlaps in planned talk times for us to plan when each talk would happen and how to best cater to the audience's daytime schedules for talks.
Brand Visual Samples
