Summary of TES

TiE Entrepreneur Summit (TES) was a three-day summit where gathered more than 1500 entrepreneurs together to network with industry biggies and mentors once in every two years. TiE approached Dig Design Studio to create the brand and communication around this year’s theme - Celebrating the Entrepreneur Trip.

Basic overview

Bengaluru is an active startup zone, especially in the tech and mobile sector. There are about 500 startups in the city, growing by the week. The new age startups are young, agile and globetrotting generation. They have shed big corporate lives, achieved exposure to the world’s best and are globetrotters.

Connecting to these young blood entrepreneurs was important factor for TiE where TES balanced the new entrepreneurs on one side and industry biggies on the other, making the event branding a dynamic challenge. Dig Design Studio’s new brief focused on using the branding and visual language to solve this challenge. In other words, ‘No more regular, predicable, corporate or business like... No blues!

No greys!’ Here warned Dig Design Studio – “You will chase the new entrepreneurs away!”

Plans outlined

TiE agreed with Dig Design Studio, having experienced it firsthand and all started planning for TES 2011 to shed its old school image. No more preachy; ‘I know all’ attitude worked for the startups. “Dynamic, vibrant, exciting, energetic, buoyant… all nice and exciting words! How do we translate this to design? Quickly getting to the drawing board, we started ideating on the main element, the ‘logo’. This is what would set the tone for the event,” elucidated Shyam Narayan, co-founder of Dig Design Studio.

His narration continued, “Our initial ideas were based around road trip. Imagery of arrows pointing at different paths... it’s not about the destination... and it’s never a single path. There were elements of the trip itself to suggest the journey. Another one was ‘thumbs up’... hitch a ride, like, approve, spine mudra, adventure, best of luck... all rolled into one.” It mirrored the startup spirit – branding started with a bright idea!

Graphic elements

Dig Design Studio team moved away from the obvious ideas around the trip, the final design was around ‘morphing cubes’. The ‘out of box’ idea - represented! “The logo morphed and changed each time it appeared. Many avatars of the logo were designed. An illusion got created by different planes and colours on the cube. The colour palette was bright and contained varying shades of red, pink, green and yellow,” explained Mitalee, communication designer behind the new TES logo.

The summit theme ‘Celebrating the Entrepreneur Trip’ accompanied the logo. A brand story was created comprising the visuals around a trip theme, to engage the audience further. These brand stories, serious at first glance, turned out to be informal, humourous and intriguing with small twists in each tale. The visual elements of the brand story contained modified road signs, long winding roads, falling people, cycles, kings travelling on elephants... all making the entrepreneur’s ‘journey’ picture complete.

“Once the logo and brand story were decided upon, we had to quickly carry it forward to the communication materials. Designing for an event is extremely challenging. Everything is in a state of flux, except for the event date. The schedule for example is quite open ended. So, continuous adaptation of the design is required,” mentioned Shruthi who led the communication design front.

Visual communication

All artifacts were created for continuous audience engagement to bring together the right crowd. Each collateral packed a different logo and a different brand story combination alongside its relevant content and communication. The communication materials... such as bookmarks as give-away at business section at book stores, e-mailers to even ‘engage the engaged’ with updates about new speakers and their chosen topics of discussion.

The TES sponsorship brochures were designed a tad bit differently as the audience was different– but containing the flavour of the event branding. Advertisements and advertorials were designed for inserts in magazines and newspapers. Posters to announce the events were placed in corporate and partner outlets. The TES event had five tracks going on in parallel, each addressing a different topic: Consumer, Tech-media Telecom, Entrepreneur Trip, Special Interest Groups and Guru Talk. For the event, the stage backdrops were created to carry a relevant brand story to connect with the audience for these topics.

Final appraisal

Dig Design Studio also participated in the exhibition at TES and was able to hear firsthand comments. “It was exhilarating to get the response firsthand. There were a lot of praises for the design. Comments? The best TES branding! Really changed the image of TiE... Organisers had all appreciations for the studio, mentioning the branding connected with young entrepreneurs very well, their turnout has been higher,” observed Sneha Lakshman, co-founder, Dig Design Studio. Certainly, the overall aim for the project made entrepreneurs notice design that has been spot-on.

About Dig Design Studio Dig Design Studio is a multidisciplinary studio working on interaction and communication design solutions. Incepted by alumni of IDC (Industrial Design Centre), IIT Bombay in 2003 with their motto – Better Experiences by Better Design – this design firm is widely known for its ventures into experiences of products, interaction, artifacts, behaviours and environments. They offer comprehensive design services in the field of interaction and communication designs. The studio setup encourages a culture of ideation and collaboration. What sets Dig Design Studio apart is the rigorous design reviews by multidisciplinary teams and a high onus on a prototype-driven validation of ideas that form the core of the design process. For more info, visit: www.digdesignstudio.com