Zillow Unlock 2021 - Hybrid

Event branding & digital assets: Michelle Mendoza
Technical production: INVNT
Location: Napa Valley, CA & Virtual

Unlock 2021 took place during the fall of 2021 where the world was experiencing a resurgence of covid-19 infections. Since planning for our Unlock conference takes place 8-10 months before the event, it was very challenging to design our event with all the changes in rules and regulations for gathering. What was initially supposed to be an in-person event for a smaller group of VIP partners, eventually became a virtually broadcasted Unlock event with in-person activities for only the production of the show.

The problem: Because we had to pivot so much, I had many ideas that started as designs for print and physical signage, which eventually became only digital assets for production. Because it was our second year as a virtual event, we had a bigger budget and much bigger expectations, so we sourced vendors to level up the technical production and animation. I needed to create a design brand kit not just for use on our team, but so I could easily hand off to the vendors for interpretation as well.

The solution: The event branding for this year was a fun play on collages – using shapes and color to create fun digital spaces. I also decided to incorporate photography to tie back to some of the key moments of the event like our speakers or the Napa Valley space where production for the show took place. I designed this kit to be great for static digital design but also allow for additional creativity and play once handed off to the animators for the presentations.

Above are the brand guidelines created for all the moving parts of the event, and all the different vendors we worked with. We hired a production company to help with running and broadcasting our event, create animations and other graphics for the show, and help with pushing out swag boxes so that we still had some real life VIP touch points with our partners.

We also worked with another platform, StreamIt, to host our event on, because as we scaled our event up, we wanted to have many more attendees this year. StreamIt was a great platform for hosting the event, but didn’t have much support for marketing our event for the months prior. Below on the left is my workflow solution for combining our existing event marketing platform, Splash, with the StreamIt platform, and all the touch points we had for marketing the event to our partners.

Zillow Unlock 2020 - Virtual

Event branding & digital assets: Michelle Mendoza
Technical production: Zillow Events
Location: Virtual/Remote

This Zillow Unlock was in the middle of the summer of 2020. It was completely virtual, and we produced it remotely from our individual homes. So our events team had to be really scrappy in producing it ourselves with only the resources we had on hand. We hosted the event in four parts over several months, and produced it entirely on Splash. My role as the lead visual designer was to create the event branding for the year, design and build the landing pages and emails, and provide support on the PowerPoint slides with my team.