The Past, Present, and Future of Braided Solidarities
2025
As creative director, I led the development of all conference touchpoints: the event website, lanyards, brochures, and posters. I managed a team of two visual designers, one UX/UI designer, and one developer to create a cohesive identity that would serve both informational and symbolic purposes.
The Brief
Asian-Indigenous Relations Collective (AIR) is an organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia that operates within the Downtown Eastside (DTES) and Chinatown to support and spotlight efforts in educating the public about the history of Asian and Indigenous communities. In September 2025, AIR hosted "The Past, Present and Future of Braided Solidarities", the largest national conference on the topic of Asian-Indigenous relations.
· · ────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ────── · ·The Problem Space
How might we create a cohesive visual identity for a national conference that authentically represents both Asian and Indigenous cultures while communicating the theme of solidarity and interconnectedness to a diverse audience?· · ────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ────── · ·
The Solution
Figure 1. Website demo
Figure 2. Main posters
Mood Board
With any project that I take on, I began by pulling together different visual elements that reflected the event. As creative director, I had the freedom to come up with the visual identity. I wanted the motif of interconnectedness to be at the forefront. We worked with the AIR design system to maintain consistency between the event and the organization, which relieved us of the task to build a new one from scratch.
Because the conference was about the coming together of two communities, we also brought together visual elements that reflected both cultures.
Figure 3. Moodboard combining Asian and Indigenous visual elements
Ideation
We began with brainstorming the desktop website design. Many of the attendees were members of the community, and most of them would be accessing the information on a desktop. The first round of ideations focused a lot of our attention on layout.
Figure 4. Initial web design ideation focusing on layout
During weekly sync ups, I pointed out that the presence of Asian elements was overpowering any Indigenous aspects. We worked together to figure out how to incorporate Coast Salish culture, and ended on basket weaving and whale imagery, which is a very common animal in Coast Salish stories. We made sure to consult with an outside individual to ensure that we were not perpetuating any stereotypes.
Figure 5. Web ideation incorporating Coast Salish elements
Figure 6. Refined web ideation with balanced cultural representation
The final design was built upon Figure 6, which was the most representative of the two communities. We used orange as the primary color to further emphasize the continuing effors of Indigenous communities to make their histories and pains known.
Brochure Design
Once we had a general sense of what the website would look like, I began to iterate on the covers for the brochures. These initial brainstorms were a space for me to explore many different styles and structures. After exploring different styles, I began to create within the overall design system.
Figure 7. Brochure cover iterations exploring different styles
Figure 8. Final brochure cover designs (left) and some additional iterations (right)
Because a portion of our attendees were Chinese seniors, we also had to prepare a translation. This definitely impacted the final design of the book, because the typography had to be able to handle Traditional Chinese characters.
You may wonder why we used a different primary colour for the brochure, and I made the decision to use darker colours because I wanted it to be a separate entity within the same touchpoint system. I did not want everything to be identical across different mediums, so many of the physical touchpoints had their own unique styles, but when seen together with the website, everything felt very cohesivev.
Design-Dev Handoff
To ensure smooth development handoff and maintain design fidelity, we created comprehensive documentation including a typography system defining all font styles and hierarchies, SVG versions of all visual elements for scalability and animation and responsive mobile designs accounting for different breakpoints.
This preparation was critical given the website's heavy use of animated elements and cultural motifs that needed to remain crisp and consistent across all screen sizes.
Figure 9. Typography system defining all font styles and hierarchies
Figure 10. SVG visual elements for scalability
Figure 11. Additional SVG elements for animation
Figure 12. Component library documentation
Figure 13. Responsive mobile designs for different breakpoints
Reflections
Leading this project taught me the importance of cultural sensitivity in design work. Balancing the representation of two distinct communities required constant communication, external consultation, and iterative refinement.
The collaborative process with my team—from weekly syncs to design reviews—reinforced how essential it is to create space for feedback and course correction, especially when working with culturally significant visual elements.