Strategy World 2026
Lead designer on Strategy's flagship annual conference for the third consecutive year. Las Vegas 2024, Orlando 2025, and Las Vegas 2026, each iteration improving on attendee feedback. Thousands of print and digital deliverables, two keynote presentations rendered across three-screen arrays, full identity, campaign, and on-site systems.
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A flagship conference is the rare project where every brand decision lands in three dimensions, on a deadline, in front of thousands of people. There is no second draft.
Strategy World 2026 was the third consecutive Strategy World I’ve led design on. Las Vegas in 2024, Orlando in 2025, Las Vegas again in 2026. Each iteration has improved on attendee feedback from the one before.
Scope
I was lead designer end to end. Conference identity and theming. Agenda design across print and digital. Keynote stage and screen system. Wayfinding throughout the venue. Sponsor and partner integration. Pre-event campaign creative, social calendar, web assets. Swag, gifting, the merch store buildout. The interactive map kiosk and Maxi Runner game as standalone touchpoints inside the larger system.
Volume: thousands of print and digital items shipped under one design system, on one deadline, against one creative direction.
The keynote presentations
The two keynotes were the centerpiece. They ran on a three-screen array that made conventional slide design impossible. A keynote on three connected screens has to be designed as one composition, not three. Each cue is a wide-format still or short film that the speaker walks across.
The decision early on was that this couldn’t be solved with stock or photography. The brief, the timeline, and the resolution requirements all pointed at one approach: generate it. The entire production pipeline ran through FAL.ai with delivery and review inside Discord, which let the team iterate on hundreds of cues in parallel without bottlenecking on file management.
For cinematic moments we used Kling V3 Pro and Seedance 1.5 Pro. For hero stills and establishing frames, FLUX 2 Pro and Nano Banana 2 with reference imagery. For brand-locked sequences (Maxi, the cyberpunk neon language, the Strategy mosaic visual), the custom LoRAs trained against the brand. Topaz handled the upscale to broadcast resolution.
It was the first keynote of this scale I’d seen produced almost entirely through generative tools. The economics, the iteration speed, and the visual ambition aren’t going back.
Print, digital, and on-site
Print: programmes, agendas, signage and wayfinding, lanyards and badges, on-site merch and packaging, gifting collateral, sponsor placements, catering and hospitality materials.
Digital: the conference website and microsites, the digital agenda app, social campaigns, paid media creative, email cadence, partner co-marketing, the interactive venue map kiosk, and all the screen content not tied to keynotes.
The discipline I held was simple: every surface uses the same type system, the same orange, the same near-black, the same approach to imagery. No exceptions for “this medium is different.”
Working through the team
Volume of this kind isn’t possible alone. A small in-house team owned major workstreams across motion, UX, and print, and external production partners handled fabrication, AV, and on-site execution. The brief I wrote for each workstream was as much a design decision as the work itself.
Recognition
I was awarded Strategy’s President’s Club for the rebrand and conference work. The award recognises sustained contribution at the executive level and is given to a small number of people across the company each year.
What it became
The conference shipped on time, on system, and at a quality level that set a new bar. The patterns we proved (typographic discipline, restrained colour, cinematic generative imagery, interactive surfaces that earn their place) are now the operating defaults for the brand. Each year of Strategy World inherits from the last rather than starting fresh.