The creation of the BCON24 design identity

Blender Conference! Every year, a lot of love and care goes into the organization of the event that brings together so many Blender users, developers, friends and families together! This is an exciting event which needs an equally exciting branding. In the past, each conference had its own unique design and identity. In this article I will explain how we came up with the identity for this year’s BCON - from the first brainstorming to the final blend files for the animation festival and hopefully highlight everyone who contributed to it.

Concept

It all started with this year’s theme: Making Blender. I had an initial conversation with Ton very early on to get a feeling of what the theme means for him and how we could translate it into a graphic design. He mentioned that it could feel like entering the workshop of an inventor or a crazy collector; a common movie trope in action-adventure films where the protagonists retrieve an item to drive the story forward. This brainstorm was quite helpful, I didn’t want to get finished ideas, but more the overall vibe of what the design should feel like.

For me it came down to this: The logo should have a handmade feel to underline the "making" aspect. It should incorporate some mixed media elements to symbolize the variety of the development community. To match that organic feeling, the color scheme I opted for was more muted in return (we can always crank it back up next year).

Last year's design was pretty punchy, so this was a welcome change. We should get a feel for the many different aspects that go into development, but also the people behind it. The intention was to show the vibrancy of Blender’s community and the collaboration between artists and developers.

The logo would sit on top of a "work desk" which is surrounded by the actual Blender developer’s scribbles, post-its and paper notes. Pens, stationary and other artifacts should be placed around it to create the illusion of a vibrant, creative mess.

Logo

For the logo itself I was influenced by mixed media and Dada art and type experiments of the last century: Jean Tinguely’s letters as well as various classic graphic designers. I also discussed these with Márton Lente, who creates our annual report and website designs and supplied some great additional references.

After some initial doodles on paper, I made a few quick mockups in Inkscape. There were several experiments with different typefaces. An additional idea was to include photos as compositional elements to support the letters. Francesco suggested the inclusion of a keyboard as the main tool of the developers.

But as you can see from that last experiment in the bottom right corner, another idea was starting to form...

The woof factor

In my experience a design like this works best with a focal point, a key graphical element or even a character! I played around with a photo I took of Bowie - Ton’s cute little dachshund. The result immediately looked less serious and had a very charming - albeit quite random feeling which I generally still associate with Blender. The goal was to tap into the creative side of development, many developers are artists as well and creative mess is not uncommon.

So the idea of Bowie behind a keyboard was born. To add sophistication, I asked Vivien if she could paint this as a detailed watercolor illustration. So we set up a short photo session with Bowie and Ton to get a reference for his body pose and perspective. To emphasize the mixed media feeling, his sunglasses would later be added as a real object in the scene or a glued-on photograph.

Vivien created a few quick sketches so I already had something to test out the logo composition with. Among other styles we wanted to evoke the feel of Leonardo da Vinci's animal drawings. She put a lot of time and effort into these and even mixed her own unique pigment ink to get the right amount of glow on the outlines. Several paintings were produced to match the color palette of the digital design.

Eventually she supplied an ink drawing of Bowie, which was scanned as a safety backup and then finalized with watercolor. The final illustration was scanned and color corrected in Krita. It took some more color pushing and some creative AgX/sRGB voodoo to get a good result out of the Cycles render.

Creative mess

Over the years I observed Ton and several other Blender developers sketching out their ideas in notebooks. From little doodles to intricate diagrams, for me this makes the art of development a more tangible process. Rather than making them up myself, I wanted to include actual notes that were used to design existing code. This would provide the necessary realism and would give people the opportunity to contribute to the final design as well.

I asked everyone in our studio for their own hand- drawn diagrams and scribbles, and people delivered a lot of great material! To pad it all out, Dalai Felinto handed me a whole stack of his own sketchbooks with quite charming drawings. For the nostalgia factor, I also scanned a few pages from one of Ton's old notebooks. And of course, Bowie’s paw print had to be there as well. I generally tried to pick notes that looked visually interesting and have enough variation and rhythm to hold up to repeated viewings.

The notes were all scanned and then cleaned up in Krita. For the main poster graphic I did a giant composition in Inkscape which could be mapped to the table surface in Blender.

In addition to the notes I wanted to place objects that can be found around our studio and are generally used by people during the development process. I modeled a few pencils, pens and markers. A ruler, paper clamps and a screwdriver were also bashed together. Someone had the idea to feature some UI elements as "actual" objects made from real-world materials. So I created the sculpt brush and the knife cut tool icons out of "clay" with a sculpting tool next to it and a realistic looking wire-frame cube to resemble the extrude widget.

Variations and Merch

We needed quite a variety of graphics. The main poster frame was used for several backgrounds and a variation of it was used as the background for the stand-up banners throughout the conference venue.

The t-shirt graphic was intended to be a more stripped down line drawing of the watercolor painting since it had to be silk-screen printed with a limited set of colors. I hand-traced the scan of Vivien’s line drawing in Inkscape. Then I added the logo and keyboard elements. The final silk screen template was created by boolean-cutting the vectors against each other to remove the overlap between all elements.

The stickers were variations of the logo and t-shirt design with some changes and extra text.

Additionally, a lot of extra graphics that show up around the BCON venue were produced. This happened quite late - two days before the conference - but was quite easy since I had a big enough set of 2D assets prepared to create variations with.

You can check out more variations in the content gallery.

Animation Festival

Every year at BCON there is an animation festival which showcases the best shorts made by the blender community. The entries are sorted into different categories and screened on the first evening of the conference. Like every year we needed a main title animation as well as short title clips for each category. These were created in the same design language as the conference. We wanted to keep the same hand-made aesthetic of the other graphics and make it look like stop motion animation.

To start the process, I transferred the vector layout of the developer’s notes into a full blender scene which had the images mapped on individual planes - this way it would be easier to shift things around if needed. I cleaned up all the hastily modeled stationary and slapped rigs on everything to simplify animation.

The main titles are basically a reveal of the BCON logo and festival title. Simon created a geometry nodes setup to render cross-hatched text. I animated some sketchy lines on top of that to show the "construction" of the logo. For the Suzanne statue (the festival’s award) time-lapse I chopped up Julien's original 3d print model into pieces and creating several sculpting stages - similar to how a real-life clay sculpture would function, complete with twisted wire armature. The models were swapped in using a simple geometry node setup.

For the rest, Beau, Rik and I sat down and brainstormed some ideas. We came up with little vignettes for the main category titles. In “Best Design” we wanted to feature the wire-frame extrude widget again.

For "Best Animation" Rik had the idea of animating a classic art mannequin (modeled in record speed by Beau!). Both vignettes were animated by Rik as well.

Beau created an awesome flipbook animation with geometry nodes for “Best Short” which he drew to resemble a storyboard.

I ended up creating the “Special Selection” category clip, but Rik fixed my crappy timing and tweaked the light and footprint animation.

Everything was rendered in Cycles with some area lights and a nice CC0 HDRI background, courtesy of Polyhaven.

To show each entry’s name and the people who worked on it, we also had to create short title cards. Normally this is a manual process of typing in everything by hand, placing text objects and rendering them out with a few varying backgrounds. This time I wanted to automate the process, so I made a simple template with a generator script. The template features the "work desk" and some text created with geometry nodes.

The script has a list of all the required entries, picks one of five predefined camera locations on the canvas and replaces the text with each entry's details. It then renders out the film clip with Eevee and jumps to the next one. With this generator we could always update the list of entries and quickly re-render clips with ease.

Beau rendered out the final title cards and oversaw the entire pre-selection of the entries as well as the festival programming, no small feat! I ended up creating the music and sound design of every clip.

If you want to check out all the assets for the animation festival interstitials, check out our project files.

Overall, BCON24 was a blast! It was extremely rewarding to see the design fit together and get positive feedback. I had a great time collaborating with a lot of talented people. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this year's conference identity and see you again next year!