2004
Background
HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth, and is a conference held every two years in New York City. With an average attendance around 3000 people it is one of the largest events of it's kind, and it receives a huge amount of media attention. I volunteered to handle the design for their fifth event, and was responsible for the entirety of the project. It was completed over 7 months.
The nature of this event, the sponsors, and the attendees are a very edgy, subversive, and broad-minded group. Everything about the event, it's speakers, it's lecture and panel topics, it's organizers was aimed at getting attention, creating a stir, and shouting out a message. Being in New York City, and a few steps away from Times Square, we were faced with the challenge of creating enough commotion to be heard above the general din. However, we also had the distinct advantage of being in an intellectual, open-minded city. Aside from meeting the basic design requirements of the event, website, logo, t-shirts, & entry badges, I was allowed full reign over the visual experience.
- Logo Design
- Website interface design & implementation with extreme browser compatibility
- Flyers, signs and other printed materials
- T-shirt design
- Decoration of the event space, including two 8ft paintings for the front windows, 10 ft homemade banners, flag designs, and spray-paint stencil designs.
- Entry badge design (armbands)
The theme of the event was "propaganda" and the was name "The Fifth HOPE." The image of Charles Demuth's The Figure Five in Gold came to mind immediately. Even though in the end we ended up using a number of different style 5's, the energy of this image set the tone for the project. I didn't waste any time getting bold with the logo design. We played around with a few other ideas, but the "fist" held an undeniable appeal. It really worked for a few reasons: There was play on the Fifth HOPE, and five fingers, and as a result hands and gestures became a sub-theme. It was also surprising to see a positive message in a prison tattoo, where "HATE" might have been a more expected message. The graphic was stark and brazen, and inspired many interesting and ironic uses.
Web
In fitting with our theme, the website revolved around the idea of hidden and contradictory messages. Each page featured a small collage cluttered with tons of classic propaganda images, and it illustrated the absurdity and satire of the concept. I took "subtext" literally, and with a very creative use of CSS manage to fill the background of the pages with a selectable-text coded message about the conference. Call to action buttons o the site were modeled after actual vintage propaganda posters, and each page sported a section-appropriate hand gesture. Like the logo, many of these were traced from scanned images of my own hands.
The final site is archived here:
→ http://jennifergergen.com/jag/sites/Hope5/
Register Button 
Home 
Volunteer 
Trvel 
Location 
Speakers 
Register T-shirts & Badges
There needed to be different versions of both t-shirts and badges for attendees, speakers, volunteers, security, and organizers. For the entry badges we decided on armbands. They were color-coded for the different types of attendees, but the vast majority were black with a silver imprint of the HOPE Fist. Seeing thousands of hackers piled in a room all in black armbands made a very impressive sight. For the t-shirts, instead of using the logo everywhere I went with stark, evocative, almost silly slogans, and matching illustrations.
Decoration
The decoration of the space was the most new and interesting part of the project for me. For the design I parodied fascist symbols and aesthetics, but for the production of these elements I went with a very guerilla, DIY, political rebel rally look, and aside for some professionally printed flags, I created all of the elements by hand at home in my Brooklyn loft. The result was somewhat controversial, but regardless of how people felt about it, having such an aggresive and present theme sparked many conversations and became the object of thousands of photographs.
Front Windows
The conference was held at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and the front windows of the convention area happen to be directly across from the main exit of Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and are seen by tens of thousands of people every day. I made two 8ft tall paintings for the front windows which were topped with the slogan "This is not propaganda." One of the paintings featured an upside-down American flag, and the after the first day the hotel received so many calls with complaints that the painting was "un-american," that the they were taken inside for the remainder of the conference.
Main Lecture Hall
The main lecture hall is lined with columns, so I decided to make long, skinny red banners with the stencils of the HOPE Fist spray-painted in a silver circle in the center of each banner. The podiums in each lecture room featured the seal of 2600 Magazine. Behind the speaker were cloth banners printed with a illustration by talented illustrator Fred Guimont with the slogan "Big Brother is Watching." We also placed red flags with the HOPE Fist on golden eagle topped flagpoles behind the speakers to complete the faux-offical look.
Workshop Floor
The second floor of the event space was designated for projects, workshop space and socializing. Another volunteer decorated it with many parodied old-style propaganda posters, and we encouraged attendees to make and post their own. Because of our contract with the hotel we needed to avoid attendees taping things to walls, so I wrapped the many square columns throughout this space with brown packing paper with spray-painted stencil images on it, to allow people to write and post their fliers on this.
Celebrities
Some famous people standing near my work.
This was an immense amount of work that needed to be completed on strict deadlines. It was very rewarding and empowering to be handed the extraordinary amount of freedom and trust I was allowed on this project. It was easy to get carried away and make grander-than-realistic plans, but time worked well as a devil's advocate. Working largely alone, it was somewhat tricky to gauge how extreme I could get and guess what the response would be to such aggressive subject matter, but in the end almost everyone got the joke, and no one perceived us as actual fascists.
The design was a smash hit, and became a hot topic of conversation for the attendees and media alike. It also set the pace for future and competing events.
Thank you to the photographers and people who appear in these photographs, and especially photographer Boris Cifuentes for attending the conference to take photographs for me.