2017 Swell by Ripple Conference
Role: Creative Director and Lead Designer
Partners: Fabian Ruhele and Alice Quan
Production: Astound
Video: FWI Media
Company: Ripple
About the Project
Swell, hosted by Ripple, is an annual event that brings together the world’s leading experts on blockchain, policy, payments and technology. In its first year, Swell attracted leaders from banking and blockchain who are committed to changing the way the world moves money today.
The program brought together a roster of payments experts and industry luminaries to discuss trends, success stories of blockchain implementations and real-world blockchain use cases to meet changing customer demands for global payments.
Watch recap video by FWI Media.
Concept
Sibos is an annual banking and financial conference organized by SWIFT. Held in Toronto that year, the tagline for their conference was Building for the Future, where they discussed the future of payments and the challenges facing correspondent banking. To coincide with Sibos, Ripple announced Swell to bring in payments experts who are also attending Sibos in Toronto. Swell’s tagline was The Future is Here, which counters Sibos’ tagline and reinforces that Ripple is the industry leader for solving the global payments problem with blockchain.
Visual Design
The concept development for the visual theme for The Future is Here was inspired by Masamune Shirow's manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell. It takes place in a (post)cyberpunk version of Earth in the near future. I wanted to articulate Swell and Ripple as a pioneer in showing the vision for what the future holds, much like Shirow imagined in his manga. I put together a mood board with images that looked futuristic and picked colors from the imagery. Please see more information about the logo development here.
Mood board for Swell 2017.
The visual identity for Swell by Ripple 2017 conference.
Digital Design
After the initial visual identity was set, we applied the language to all digital marketing materials like the website and banners to promote the event.
Example of email header and swell.ripple.com website.
