The Conference Passport in its final form
The Challenge
For 16 years running, AIGA Arizona has held Phoenix Design Week to bring together hundreds of creative professionals for talks, workshops, networking, and community events. In 2024, the organizing team needed a printed program that could guide attendees across venues and sessions for the two-day conference. The need was for clarity and function, while staying true to the year’s theme and bold identity system.
Interior pages with covers
Interior pages with covers, schedule spread
Interior details with covers — a variety of page types showcase the breadth of the visual system
The Solution
We leaned into the “passport” metaphor — first proposed by the team at Attic Salt — as a way to echo the 2024 theme: Oasis. Speaker profiles were treated like official documents, stamped and stickered by an imagined design bureaucracy. The result felt tactile, witty, and purpose-built, but also lived-in an honest — an artifact of a well-traveled creative. Attendees responded to the balance of personality and clarity, plus the bonus of having room to scribble notes, collect autographs, or apply their own stickers, just for fun.
Sticker detail on page
Typographic styles details on page
Interior details — stamps and stickers, along with type styles and treatments
Speaker page with session description
Sponsor spread with lists and details
Example spreads — speaker and sponsor pages
Phoenix Design Week 2024 Director Sheila Schumacher presents from the main stage, Passport in-hand.
Audience member thumbing through the session descriptions.
The Process
My role was to lead design and production of the program booklet, drawing from the existing conference materials developed to date. This was both an engineering challenge and an exercise in brand extension. The program was built in InDesign, with heavy use of master pages, typographic styles, and best practices for image and color handling (including L*a*b* swatches for print fidelity). Working closely with project managers, planners, and print vendors, we built a workflow to place and review content efficiently. Slack, Acrobat, and Google Drive became our routing infrastructure, and the resulting book made it back from press just in time — as always.
The Passport — action shot.
Conference attendees love taking notes!
To see the larger system in action, check out Cameron Rennacker's photos from the conference or Attic Salt's project case study.
Project Team
Prescott Perez-Fox, Designer & Production Artist
Sheila Schumacher, PHXDW24 Director
Kathy Morgan, PHXDW24 Advisory Director
Molly Meisenzahl, AIGA-AZ President
Ryan Lowry, Creative Manager
Julian Martinez, Speaker Liaison
Cameron Rennacker, Photographer (and Hand Model)
Sheila Schumacher, PHXDW24 Director
Kathy Morgan, PHXDW24 Advisory Director
Molly Meisenzahl, AIGA-AZ President
Ryan Lowry, Creative Manager
Julian Martinez, Speaker Liaison
Cameron Rennacker, Photographer (and Hand Model)