Stamp of approval

This marks the end of the conference! Each person gets a stamp commemorating their attendance of this event in their passbook. I guess I could have gone for an even larger circle stamp..

Did You Know posters

And they are up! There are 28 in total.

Exhbit-B - Behind the scenes

Because the focus of the conference is on education, we created an extra side exhibition based on understanding how much work is involved in creating the conference. We wanted transparency so participants can see that there is more than just speakers and performers coming up on stage on time and that their subdivisions could host a conference if they wanted to too.

In order to be brief and succinct, I was only able to list out major departments on why they are important and their main tasks and/or difficulties. Originally, if given more space, I would have pinned real objects, photos, and drafts of proposals stacked in a pile. 

original space, then cut down in half..

IBLYARC - Teeshirts

*thank you for modelling

The shirts are on! And real people are wearing them!!

Participant package

The participant package includes the following items:

• A pen
• 8gb USB
• A single pack of swappable pins
• Cotton drawstring backpack
• Conference lanyard and namebadge
• Handbook
• Sponsorbook
• Tee shirt (not pictured above)

Stage set up

It's happeningggg. This was a full weekend of work... and then some.

Did you Know?

This is a series of posters titled, Did you know? containing interesting facts about Buddhism or BLIA or YAD. The idea was initiated by the fact that the dining hall has Chinese calligraphy paintings on the walls and many of the participants cannot read Chinese, so we were to make an English replacement for the walls that would be equally interesting for them to read.

The difficulty here was finding a font that would be appropriate and easy to read. The poster is placed fairly high up and the text varies in length.

In the end, due to the fact that the English language takes up 2x the space that Chinese characters do, we doubled the width of the posters and added some colour to make it look less serious and more fun.

IBLYARC Stage

A stage decoration was asked for two events during the conference, the Welcoming Dinner and the Buddha's Light Night. They wanted something that said, "Hey, look, we (Toronto) are your hosts, but we are happy you (any other city, Canadian or American) are here too with us." without looking nationalistic (via hanging a big flag) and looking like a political campaign. 

So I set to create a cityscape that held icons from each participating city in the conference. From left to right: Dallas (Tower), Orlando (Disney), Edmonton (City hall), New York (Liberty), Toronto (CN tower), Montreal (Biodome), Vancouver (Totem pole), Fremont (City hall), and Los Angeles (Hollywood).

Construction first draft

Construction took a while to figure out. We wanted something that wouldn't take up too much stage space and wouldn't fall over when people are dancing on stage. In the end we built everything out of foamcore and supported it with wooden posts and bags of rice as weights. A light ran between the skyline and the buildings to create extra depth and shadows.

IBLYARC signage

Signs! These things are everywhere, helping direct traffic, helping lost participants find their workshops, helping registrants locate their items, etc. With such a large committee organizing different things there was no way we would be able to guess what everybody would need from our team for certain planned events. We sent out a notice for each department to register (by a certain date) for any signage ("service") they needed from us for their event/sessions and our team would make them, print them, and leave it in a box for pick-up. This communication worked out super well because it saved us from wasting work and time. Woohoo!

go team!

Man this is going to be a rough month.

Luggage tags

The accommodation team needed something that would allow us to identify and separate luggage from different cities so when they transport them from airport to hotel so it doesn't get confused in the shuffle. I made the luggage tag only under the instruction of "make me a luggage tag" so I drafted one up quickly. Meanwhile another team felt that the tags were not suited to their needs, so we made a second type that was 17" long and had each individual's last name written on it. Later we also colour coordinated the tags with a coloured ribbon for easy sorting. A specific colour for each city.

drafts

IBLYARC handbooks

A series of covers were made for the conference handbook. The handbook holds the conference schedule, rules and regulations, and all sorts of handy information. I assumed there would be a little more freedom with the design so I threw some more fun ideas into the mix.

In the end, none of them were chosen and a cover made for the sponsorbook was revamped for the handbook.

Conference souvenirs - teeshirts

Choices, choices. Since the bags ended up as red, I went to look for something that wouldn't interfere too much with the red backpack. There was a moment of alarm when the committee head asked for a red shirt, but we fixed that. Ash grey seemed like a pretty safe idea, but in the end we went for white.

Sponsorbook sketchbook pages

Working on a hunch for a background for the sponsor pages. A light image of the youth working together, happy and collaborating, and on top, are our sponsors, helping us make it happen.

Nametags, lanyards

Lanyards are for keeps, but the nametag usually just gets thrown away. The biggest difficulty was actually in finding a supplier who will get us 3/4" wide lanyards for cheap at a small volume. Who would have guessed these one-time-use neck things cost so much! Even though the design was approved early, we couldn't find a reasonable supplier until a few months later and forgoing local Canadian distributers. 

For the lanyard, I thought it would be fun to place the maple flag in the center. It gives it more of a graphic element to the whole piece. I also did some more serious looking ones just in case. The Olympics was a good visual resource for these. On the back of the neck is the Toronto cityscape, or a Canadian icon so when people are taking photos you'll still be able to see something if you're turned around.

For the nametags, there were originally four colour distributions for different levels of participants, staff, participant, venerable, and special guest. However, we boiled it down to just two for two colours: participants and staff. Special guests received a pin badge and a corsage instead.

Conference souvenirs - pins

The logo is round, pins are also round. So hey, why not!
Even though I don't really like pins, I'm pretty excited about the turnout for this souvenir. We made four designs in four colours and will be handing them out at random to encourage participants to swap and trade their pins with their new friends.

Conference souvenirs - backpack

One of the souvenirs for the conference is a drawstring backpack. These are handy because participants have stuff to hold like their schedule, notebooks, pens, waterbottle, and etc.

I suggested tote bags, but tote bags are apparently girly, so we went for backpacks. Finding a good supplier who can get us a good quote for such a small volume was one of the biggest difficulties here. Second was finding a cheap canvas or cotton tote, rather than going for that wishy-washy weird-feeling waterproof material. Nonetheless we found one in the states and got it shipped to us JUST IN TIME for the conference.

I made four options to choose from. The bag was requested to be in a red colour, and the more colours you screenprint the pricier it gets so I kept everything white.

Final decision! We went with this one!

A passport stamp

For each conference, a stamp is stamped into the participants' YAD passport marking their attendance to the year's conference. I was looking to make something very immigration-like. A play on the fact that it is a "passport stamp". 

However, in execution, the reality was that there were size constraints, cost constraints, and even shape constraints on the stamp. Plus, the text could not get too small or else they will turn into a blob..especially Chinese characters. 

What's neat was that I worked with a stamp-maker remotely through online video chatting and screensharing as we shared my ai file. Technology these days! I was pretty impressed since my own skype can't really hold a stable connection on most days.

Conference souvenirs - USB

swag!

The main souvenir for the conference is a USB. We opted for something that felt useful and wasn't something that somebody would want to throw away when they got home. At the end of the conference we're going to put photos, a video summary, and useful documents used during the conference on the drive so participants can take them home and share it with their subdivisions for future use or reference. 

Green is the main theme colour, but the organising committee head has a strong affinity with the colour red so the resulting USB graphics were in red afterwards. 

IBLYARC Poster

They decided that they wanted to get their word out there as fast as possible, so a quick poster was drafted and sent to all subdivisions in North America. Originally meant to be a quick poster to disseminate information to local youth groups the deadline kept getting pushed and it ended up taking months before we were able to send it out. Although not within my plans, the logo, too, was eventually derived from the poster.

and yes, I'm swamped.