Urban Food Systems Symposium

Posted: January 3, 2021 by maurica

I had the privilege of working the staff in charge of producing the Urban Food Systems Symposium. Based out of Kansas, and mid-pandemic our communications were over Teams, email, and zoom. This event was designed to be entirely digital to keep attendees and speakers safe.

This project allowed me to dive into the Affinity programs to see what they are capable of. I have used Adobe products my entire career, and have wanted to try something outside of my comfort zone that is more affordable. I would definitely recommend Affinity!

I designed the symposium program, and the book of abstracts cover, which was the same as the symposium program, but labelled differently. I did some illustrative experimentations with the design, and while they weren’t used on the front cover, elements were used on the back cover.

To see the full program, click here.

Cover concepts

I played with the name of the symposium by working with sprouts growing out of the city itself to represent the nourishment of cities. Further into the process, I discovered Kansas State University is known for the research they do on tomato plants. I swapped the simple sprouts for tomato plants shown in different stages of their growth. Ultimately a different photo was approved for use by an outside source, and the cover concept was scrapped in favor of a more simple design.

So much content, so little space…

The interesting part about this project was trying to fit all of the needed content and making the hierarchy fit, all while balancing white space.