2005
Background
The Chaos Computer Club is a nearly 30-year old institution. Every December they throw Europe's finest, and the world's largest hacker conference. The event attracts 5000 attendees, international press attention, and the subjects' most prestigious speakers. I volunteered to tackle the design for their twenty-second annual. The project was completed over 4 months under the Art Direction of Tim Pritlove and Gregor Sedlag.
The Chaos Computer Congress attracts two main demographic groups: For regulars it is a "family reunion" for members and hackers, many of whom volunteer to help run the event and other related projects. For them the design must reflect their emotional attachment tot he community. The the clothing we design will be worn all year, the posters will decorate their clubhouses and homes, and the stickers and buttons will adorn their laptops and backpacks. For the rest, people who are curious about the hacker community like artists, engineers, & scientists, and the press, the design must be representative of the sophistication of the organization, raise questions, and invite conversation. This is a major source of revenue for the event, so the design must be popular, which can be a difficult thing to achieve in such a diverse and argumentative community.
- Logo Design
- Flyers, stickers and other printed materials
- Poster
- T-shirt design
- Website interface design & implementation with extreme browser compatibility
- Wordpress & Mediawiki skins
The theme was "Private Investigations." I started with a round of concepting that explored different treatments of a "world through hacker-colored glasses" with hackers as the investigators, and highlighting the kinds of "clues" that hackers would pick up on in various situations that ordinary people miss.
Identity
We decided that instead of focusing on the "investigator" or the "investigated" we should take a closer look at the concept, and go for the bigger picture. Privacy is an important issue to hackers, and as the world becomes increasingly networked, it is becoming the kind of key issue that will have a profound effect on whole world. Searching for a metaphor for our purposes, we hit upon the movie Blade Runner, a cult favorite especially among this particular subculture. I parodied the movie's type treatment, and sometimes accompanied it with a graphic of an oragami unicorn. This "clue" from the movie symbolized the importance of the unanswered questions concerning privacy and its relationship to our future world.
Flyers
It was imperative to get flyers made and printed to advertise at events in the US and Europe prior to our show. This lonely Gothenburg street photo (courtesy of Morguefile.com) began the first real experiments with the "environment" as the main character in the design. I made a color and black & white versions of the flyer in both US and metric paper sizes.
Poster
The design of the poster cemented the concept. I added elements from the city of Berlin, the Congress Center itself, classic CCC icons like the rocketship to heavily-edited futuristic buildings against a dark foreboding skyline. The result was a blend of reality and invention that was personal and specific to the event, but mysterious and inviting in its connotations.
T-shirt
The t-shirt design was challenging because up to this point, all of the design was very color intensive, and had rich multi-tonal backgrounds. I mirrored the poster concept, with flattened 1-bit buildinggraphics, halftone patterns, and primary colors.
Stickers & Buttons
The t-shirt design turned out to be a versatile and impactful image and was easily adapted to other formats, like stickers & buttons.. It was interesting to work in metric, and I was extra careful to set up my files as simply, and by-the-books as possible, to make sure it was easily understood by German printers.
Web
Since this community revolves around the internet, there were three main websites that required design attention: the blog, the wiki, and the static site. The blog was an easy job because it was run with Wordpress, and we were able to modify a standard theme. I created a new header graphic, and we changed some colors and images, but left the layout and functionality mostly untouched. The wiki was a whole different ballgame. It was run with MediaWiki, a very involved, robust wiki software, which at the time was not very well documented, and skinning it was a very laborious task. The static site was managed by a custom content management system, and I worked with another volunteer to implement the design. The design of the website was left for last, and in the end, we had to rush didn't have time to get things up to the standard of the rest of the design.
The final site is archived here:
→ http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/
Event
It was very rewarding to see the design be so present in the minds of the con-goers. It's not every day a designer gets to see their work built up in legos before their eyes.
This was a very big job done in a short amount of time. It was gratifying to work on a volunteer project with people who were familiar with the design process, and expected professional work, but it was new experience to watch my designs be approved by committee. We were a little more concerned with doing things correctly over doing them on time, so some things ended up disproportionate in their quality.
The event was a huge success drawing a larger international presence than previous years.
Thank you to the photographers and people who appear in these photographs.