Automattic Grand MeetupNo. 011

The 2019 Grand Meetup was held at a large hotel in Orlando, and most of the design problem was making a large hotel in Orlando feel like something other than a large hotel in Orlando.

Automattic is fully distributed, so the Grand Meetup does more work than a normal company offsite. It's a week of sessions, meetings, and training for the whole company in one place, and for a lot of people it's the only time all year they're in a room with the people they work with. Around a thousand people came. This turned out to be the last complete one — the company still gathers, but now in groups organized by division rather than all at once.

The major constraint we had to reckon with was printing. Our contract with the hotel required us to produce through an on-site FedEx Office location. That pushed us to lean heavily on applied vinyl wraps and graphics to transform the space. We added hotel keys, name badges, menus, presentation slides, print collateral, and more to complete the package.

The most interesting part of this and any internal event design project is what you're allowed to say. In marketing work you're building a brand and inviting people into it. Here the audience is already inside, and the brand wasn't constructed by anyone — it grew out of what employees actually do and say. My job was to reflect the best parts of that back in a way that made my co-workers feel seen and like they belonged. I pulled heavily on the text of the Automattic Creed, which is the closest thing the company has to a founding document, and worked in a lot of inside jokes and specific references that would be meaningless to an external audience. Bold color and large typographic treatments carried the message and was loud enough to compete with the carpet.

Some of the design I did for this event are still some of my favorites I've done. Making a thousand people feel recognized and at home in an Orlando ballroom was a very specific challenge, but I think we did a pretty good job.