As the sole in-house designer at WBE Canada, I owned every touchpoint of the annual national conference - the app, the website, the signage, the screens on stage. Over multiple years of iteration, in-app engagement grew by 267% and meetings booked increased by 170% in 2025.
Designer, Webflow Developer
Figma, Wordpress, Adobe Suite
Q1-Q3 2025
The challenge was bridging digital and in-person experience, designing a unified experience that guided attendees from online registration to on-site navigation, networking, and engagement.
I developed a reusable visual system for the conference built on WBE Canada's brand colours, extended with new shapes and gradients. Early concepts explored several directions for how far to push beyond the core brand palette, some options introduced new colours and started to feel disconnected from WBE Canada's identity, while others felt too safe to stand out as a distinct event brand.
Through several rounds of review with stakeholders, I narrowed in on a system that extended the palette just enough to feel like its own moment, while staying recognizably WBE Canada. The result was designed to work across both digital and print applications, ensuring consistency from the first social post through to on-site signage, utilizing all of WBE Canada's branding palette for different purposes.
In previous years, designs were handed off to developers as static screenshots rather than to-scale files, often causing layouts to drift from the original design once built. For 2025, I designed the site in Figma to work precisely to scale, then built it myself in WordPress, taking on both design and development in-house rather than outsourcing the build, which also reduced project costs. Owning the full process end-to-end meant nothing was lost in translation between design and what shipped, and let me make refinements in real time as the build came together.
Working within Brella's platform constraints, I configured the app to reflect conference branding and built a multi-touchpoint strategy to drive adoption: a how-to guide for first-time users, in-app stories walking attendees through setting up networking, QR codes on event signage linking directly to the app, and looping reminder slides on the main screens prompting attendees to book meetings. This layered approach, reinforcing the same call to action across print, screen, and in-app content –contributed to a 267% increase in in-app engagement and 170% growth in meetings booked.
Social graphics, email banners, and speaker announcement cards were produced as a cohesive set, built from the same visual system, allowing fast production across formats without sacrificing consistency.
Conference signage and attendee badges were designed to do more than identify: badge colour-coding let attendees instantly distinguish WBEs, corporates, partners, and general attendees at a glance, while embedded QR codes linked directly to Brella profiles, turning a physical badge into an entry point for in-app networking.
All main stage screens were designed and managed by me, including speaker transition slides, lower thirds, and sponsor recognition. Lower thirds were positioned to avoid blocking speaker camera views, a small detail that meaningfully improved the broadcast quality of recorded sessions. An LED wall in the lobby ran additional promotional content throughout the day. QR codes placed throughout the venue linked directly to the Brella app home page, reducing the friction of getting attendees into the app on the day.
I worked directly with the AV team to manage file handoff, screen assignments, and real-time updates on the day, ensuring the right graphic hit the right screen at the right moment across the main stage and lobby.
Over 400 attendees moved through a coherent, connected experience – from registration to the conference floor. In-app engagement grew 267% and meetings booked increased 170% year-over-year, reflecting stronger adoption of the networking tools built into the experience.
