Behind the design work of Building Intercom

When designing for a specific audience, the challenge lies in not reducing that audience down to a trope.

Next Wednesday, November 29, we’re hosting ‘Building Intercom,’ a unique engineering event that’s all about building, scaling and taking risks with our product. We knew we needed an equally unique visual identity for the event page, including printed materials, ads and speaker slide templates. Being a designer often means knowing how to avoid aesthetic risks, but to keep with the spirit of “taking risks” for this project it meant embracing them. Here’s how we did that.

Designing for engineers

In early conversations about the event we decided it needed to be “unapologetically nerdy.” I kept this in the back of my mind as a rubric throughout the process.

However, finding a visual style that was “unapologetically nerdy” was difficult. The “nerdy engineer” is a tired cliché at this point and it’s a challenge to convince a smart audience that your efforts to target them are backed with sincere intentions.

Too often you see engineering branding that is inoffensive or bland, with styles or themes that over-rely on nostalgia. An early version of the page made this mistake:

There’s a pretty large web of potential traps and pitfalls for making things obvious. Outside this territory of known nerdy aesthetics was the complete unknown – a risky space.

The Hershey font: where our brand and event meet

I first heard about the Hershey fonts at TypeCon 2016 in Seattle in this talk given by Frank Grießhammer. A.V. Hershey was a theoretical physicist who programmed instructions that plotted zero width vectors into the shape of letters to use in his publication and computational work for the U.S. Navy in the late 1960s. In his 1967 paper ‘Calligraphy for Computers’ he outlines how he went about drawing the ridged alphabets in such a way as to “produce [a] pleasing effect”. Hershey was a rare, prolific pioneer. His inspiring work as a creative coder and ear