Jacob Waites Visual & Interaction Designer

Jacob Waites is a Visual & Interaction designer specializing in brand design & experience. Living at the intersection between designer & developer, Jacob seeks to bridge the gap between digital and physical. Jacob co-founded Foremost, a creative collective working around the globe, and is currently working at IDEO CoLab. Jacob is also an avid instant photographer and a big fan of tacos.

Blueprint 2018 Event Branding

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.

I led the blueprint brand team for 3 years from 2016 to 2018, creating themed event collateral and visual style guides for the CoLab so that the prototypes showcased would have a uniform presentation across the venue. All Blueprint events were forward looking, and based off of an inspiration word or term. 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.

Event video

The event

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.

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Event website

Visual library

For all blueprint events, I created a visual library file that was shared with the entire event team, this was filled with vector and raster resources that could be copied and pasted into keynote decks or poster templates to quickly brand event comms and imagery.

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Event signage

Event signage featured prototype history along with the treated photos.

Blueprint Book

Takeaway books

We brought back the takeaway books by popular demand, this time produced by newspaper company in a much smaller format and length.

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Photography direction

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.

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Photography direction

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.

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Blueprint through the years

Blueprint evolved into an IDEO wide event in 2019, check out the branding for Blueprint 2016 and Blueprint 2017.