The Power Shift

The brief changed, so the identity had to

The conference had run twice on a bright yellow-and-lime system built for energy — and it worked, twice, in a full room. The 2026 edition moved the subject to AI, capital and innovation, which meant the audience now included investors and institutional partners alongside the community that had always turned up.

That is a harder brief than it sounds. The identity had to carry enough authority to sit beside a sponsor wall of Flutterwave, Microsoft and Interswitch, without losing the warmth that filled the room the first two times. Cold and credible is easy. Warm and credible is the actual problem.

Three routes, one system

Rather than show three different layouts, I locked the typographic system first — the same wordmark scale, the same stacked title, the same date-and-venue bar along the foot — and let the routes differ only in material and temperature. That way the conversation with stakeholders was about what the event should feel like, not about which composition they preferred.

Holding the type still is what makes a set like this useful. Put side by side, the three read as one event considering its own tone — which is the argument you actually want a stakeholder to have.

Extending the system

Once the route was chosen the same material had to survive being cut down — speaker announcements, programme cards, and a sponsor lockup that has to hold six logos without the key visual collapsing behind them.

The identity on a screen

The same system carries the event site, where it stops being a picture of the conference and starts doing its work — selling a ticket, a sponsorship and a speaking slot to three audiences who want different things from one page.