Event case study · 2023 Annual Conference

Through Adversity to the Stars

A theme dreamed up on the flight home from the previous conference: Per Aspera Ad Astra, the Starfleet motto, 'Through Adversity to the Stars.'

Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort & Spa, Rancho Mirage · January 29 – February 1, 2023

The setup

This one came to me on the plane ride home from the 2022 conference at Disneyland. The post-COVID recovery was still top of mind, but I wanted a theme that acknowledged that while also looking forward.

The theme

Every year, the ACNL President had me design a slide for their inaugural address, and the incoming president that year had picked “Accelerating Our Journey” as her theme, and I’d used a rocket taking off for the slide. Thinking about this on the plane, I remembered that the Starfleet motto (from Star Trek), is Per Aspera Ad Astra — “Through Adversity to the Stars” — and I immediately knew what the conference theme needed to be.

ACNL Strategic Plan 2022-2024 slide with the Accelerating Our Journey theme, a rocket launching beside vision, purpose, and focus-area text
The inaugural-address slide that started the train of thought. The incoming president's "Accelerating Our Journey" theme already had me thinking about rockets — one line from the Starfleet motto later, the conference theme was set.

The concept

The committee usually wanted to brainstorm a dozen ideas, but this time they loved it straight off the bat. But I didn’t have the graphic idea until a few weeks later when I was walking my dog one night and saw a beautiful jet contrail against the sunset.

Photo taken on an evening dog walk: a jet contrail streaking across a suburban street's sunset sky, framed by silhouetted trees
The photo I took on the dog walk. A jet contrail climbing away from the sunset — the "launch" image the whole graphic grew out of.

I opened up Procreate and started drawing and came up with the concept art for our graphic designer to work from.

Procreate concept art: Through Adversity to the Stars in glowing type over a purple-to-coral sunset, a small rocket lifting off a dune
My Procreate concept art. Rough, but it set the composition and mood: title in the night sky up top, a rocket rising off the horizon out of the sunset. (The Feb 6–9 date here was an early placeholder.)

The final art

Our designer took the concept art and went from that, to this:

Final key art: a space shuttle launching through towering storm clouds and a lightning-lit desert sunset into the stars, with the Through Adversity to the Stars title and ACNL logo
The final key art. Same composition as my sketch, rebuilt as a photo-composite: the shuttle breaking through the storm into a clear starfield. This drove the whole collateral suite.

The rollout

I then coordinated with him and our partners at Cvent to get the app assets set up.

Conference app splash screen: the full shuttle-launch key art sized for a phone App login background: a wide, colorful nebula and starfield fading to black on the left In-app banner: Through Adversity to the Stars over a nebula, with conference dates, Rancho Mirage, and the venue Event Details header image: the ACNL logo and title over a nebula banner with dates and venue
The attendee app suite, built to Cvent's specs: the phone splash screen, the login background, the in-app banner, and the event-detail header image.

Our partners at Working Nurse were gracious enough to give us a good rate on a full page ad, so our designer gave me a half-page version of the graphic and I paired it with my own copy, doing the layout in InDesign.

Full-page magazine ad: the vertical key art on the right, with my headline, program highlights, featured speakers, and a registration QR code laid out on the left
The full-page ad in Working Nurse. The designer's half-page graphic on the right, my copy and InDesign layout on the left — program highlights, the speaker lineup, and a registration QR code.

The awards brochure

Finally, he and I did the usual work of building the awards program brochure, which always involved me coordinating with the awards committee and the awardees themselves to get headshots and the 500-word nominations essays. I would then trim the nominations down by about 75% to fit the booklet pages, and hand off all of the text to our designer, who would take it the rest of the way home.

PDF 2023 Awards Program Brochure The finished booklet — every nomination trimmed to fit, headshots wrangled, text handed off print-ready.

Open in new tab ↗