Spring Drop-In

Building a shared community experience

The only thing more fun than designing the visual identity for this year’s Spring Drop-In was the event itself! Underbelly’s Drop-In series is an opportunity for the team to get together with like-minded people, chat with industry folks and meet new friends. This year’s virtual event featured some awesome speaker panels and a bunch of themed hangouts with the Underbelly team. We learned so much and couldn’t be happier with how things went down.

After a long Utah winter, our visual identity of the Spring Drop-In was begging for a super fun, bright, and a little bit funky design. With the idea of spring training in mind, the Underbelly Visual Design Team started by gathering inspirational colors, type, textures, and patterns.

The logo design process began with brainstorming, thumbnails, and sketching. We explored a wide variety of letter styles and compositions. The key to this step of exploration is never being afraid to make a mistake or getting a little weird. Just diving in and having fun with a sketch you may or may not use... it’s all a part of the process of finding the look and feel that’s right.

“Hand lettering has become a real passion of mine. Designing the Drop-In logo was so much fun. We wanted to give it that old-school baseball feel, with just a touch of quirkiness.” - Drew

After several rounds of hand-drawn refinements, we landed on a relatively classic baseball-inspired logotype. We really liked how the baseball theme loosely played into the idea of “spring training.” Once we felt we were in a good place with our sketches, we imported them and began the vectorization process. This included making technical improvements to the letters, exploring shadows and outlines, and additional design elements to the logo. We finally locked in the logo with a big ol’ juicy outline and a fun spring rainbow to tie everything together.

When creating a visual identity for an in-house event like this, one of the many challenges can be narrowing down the direction and reigning in all the ideas. There is an endless amount of options, especially when it comes to a color palette. We knew we wanted something retro-inspired, so we broke our color exploration into two groups... “Retro” and “Neo-Retro.” The “Retro” being more classic colors, and “Neo-Retro” having a more modern twist.

After several rounds of deliberation and refining our palette options, we landed on a six-color “Neo-Retro” palette that gave a nod to the ’70s but popped just enough to make it feel current.

One of the most fun parts of this project was coming up with our design elements and illustrations. Staying in line with the retro vibe, we hopped into the "way back machine" and put together a collection of our favorite '70s and '80s inspired objects and phrases. After a couple late nights of sketching and drawing, we locked in these super fun supporting design elements. We then had our content team animate several of the elements which really took them to the next level of "radical".

In addition to the website, we knew social media would be an essential tool for getting the word out about the event. We put in a lot of time and effort to develop a plan and the necessary assets for a comprehensive social media campaign. The colors, typefaces, and custom design elements really stood out and made a lasting impact for our campaign.

We now had a comprehensive visual identity, and it was time to put these elements to work. A mini announcement website was number one on our list of promotional items for the event. We wanted it to be memorable, catchy, and fun. Using lots of large type, motion, and animations really brought the website to life.