Making fun measurable

160 creative people. No pressure.

Digital Podge was an annual, invite-only networking event and very long lunch for senior people across the UK's digital, creative, technology, media and sports industries.

Line's directors had attended previously, and in 2009 the agency was invited to take responsibility for the event's creative.

There was no client product to sell and no corporate identity to carefully preserve.

We just had to create something memorable enough to hold its own in a room full of around 160 senior creative and digital people.

Working with Line's Creative Director, Rufus Spiller, we developed the theme:

Measurable Fun.

Data, analytics and infographics were becoming an increasingly visible part of digital culture, so we took the industry's obsession with measuring absolutely everything and applied it to something considerably less serious.

From there, I developed the identity across the website, emails and physical material surrounding the event.

Putting the fun into the data.

The identity borrowed the language of information graphics, charts, diagrams and statistics, then filled it with considerably less important information.

Rather than simply decorating the event with graphs, the data became part of its personality.

The visual system gave us a framework we could keep playing with across different formats - from the invitation and website to the communications people received before the event.

From inbox to lunch table.

The identity didn't stop at the website.

I carried it through the email communications and into the event itself, including seating plans, place cards, T-shirts and cards instructing guests to swap seats partway through the lunch.

That meant the idea could follow somebody from the first invitation they received all the way to the table on the day.

Apparently we didn't muck it up.

The work was going to be scrutinised by exactly the sort of people whose opinions we cared about, so the response was particularly satisfying.

Digital Podge organiser Phil Jones described the creative challenge as one that required a brave agency with a room full of digital industry leaders waiting to judge the result.

“Their innovative 2009 theme is most definitely the best and most ambitious yet.”

Phil Jones, Digital Podge organiser

The identity was subsequently adapted for Swedish Podge the following year.

And then it won a couple of things.

A pretty good room to be judged by.

I was still relatively early in my career when we made Digital Podge.

I wasn't the Creative Director. Rufus set the creative direction and I worked with him to develop it into the identity, website and wider event material.

But it was one of the first projects I'd worked on where I knew the finished work would be seen - and probably picked apart - by a room full of people whose job was to have opinions about this stuff.

They liked it.

The organisers liked it enough to use the work again.

And two different industry bodies gave it their award for Best Use of Visual Design.

So I figured we'd done alright.