Tiffany Trinh

W'24
SYMPOSIUM

Socratica is an open collective of markers, artists, engineers, designers, writers, poets, and everything in between. The community offers weekly co-working sessions for individuals pursuing passion projects, fostering creativity and collaboration to explore what inspires them beyond the demands of school, work, or daily responsibilities.

These weekly co-working sessions culminate in the Symposium, a focused gathering where participants showcase their projects developed throughout the year. This event cultivates an exchange of ideas and connection within a like-minded community, attracting over 700+ guests from diverse fields.

Skip to the Reflection

Role

Graphic Designer

Duration

February 2024 - April 2024

Tools & Skills

Figma, Illustrator, Blender
Graphic Design, Collaboration,
Design-thinking

Worked with

Figma, Illustrator, Blender
Graphic Design, Collaboration,
Design-thinking

Back

Background

For the previous symposium, designers Aileen Luo, Brayden Peterson, and Anthea Tawiah created the branding direction, intending to focus on purposeful graffiti, duotone photos, grunge textures, and colourful vectors.

Successfully, they created designs that captured audiences' attention with bold pops of colour, tasteful usage of typeface styles, and captured the magnitude of the event.

initial thinking

THOUGHT
PROCESS

The Socratica team hosted a team-wide call for brainstorming the initial branding of what the W’24 Symposium would be. We split our thinking into three parts:

Establishing Branding Exploration

Emotion Design Objectives

Collaborative Moodboard

Each person would spend approximately 6 minutes filling out their ideas onto a Jam-board. The overall consensus landed on the following for each section:

In contrast to the previous year, the team aimed to focus this symposium on elements such as 3D features, multimedia collage, and blue-print style graphics, all designed to create a sense of belonging within a deeply engaged community.

Iteration

Results
+
Statistics

Angela's Design

Yousuf's Design

Giang's Design

Tiffany's Design

Key insights gained from the individual designs when compared together included:

Vibrant colours need to be properly balanced to ensure they are visually effective and easy to process
The usage of assembly graphics could fill in empty white space
No matter how playful, text legibility should still be a priority

results

Results

Reflection

Effective design collaboration requires evaluating diverse opinions.

Collaborating with several designers and sharing them with a large group (think 20+ people) inevitably leads to diverse feedback based on personal preferences.
While all input can be valuable, prioritizing user needs becomes crucial. As a designer, it's about identifying the graphic's core purpose and focusing on that.

Designers can express their identity even in collaborative projects.

While working on the project, I feared if my contributions to the overall design made a meaningful difference, given the multitude of ideas being explored by the team.
However, the more I worked on this project, I found opportunities to incorporate my design strengths as the project progressed. This included exploring areas I enjoy, such as 3D rendering, character design, and more expressive use of colour.