WordCamps are community-organized events put together by WordPress enthusiasts around the world. The events are fun opportunities to meet fellow business owners, designers, bloggers, and marketers—really anyone working with WordPress.
WordCamps play an important role in the Orlando developer community. Why’s that? WordPress is open source technology that we love working with—and we make a nice living from it—so we feel it’s only right to give back to this community. WordPress gives us so much, so we’re proud to sponsor these events. We love helping others start down their own path with WordPress.
Fun Fact: The number of WordCamps (volunteer-organized WordPress conferences) has nearly doubled since 2011. For 2016, attendance is projected to be over 32,000 worldwide.
Easily Amused provided the branding, logo and design work for WordCamp conferences for three years—2013, 2014 & 2015. We collaborated with the crazy talented group of volunteers who produce these events in Orlando, ensuring everything ran smoothly and looked perfect.
Orlando is known for its iconic oranges. So the 2013 branding reflected the region’s most famous fruit. The goal of the branding package was to create a clean, versatile, fresh design that would be reusable. The logo appeared on t-shirts, bags, websites and other collateral. It was even picked up and adapted for a local WordPress design & development agency.
Going along with the WordCamp theme, we created merit badges representing camping skills. These were a lot of fun to design, and our team really let the creative juices flow. The badge designs contributed to the overall adventure feel of the conference—and made us reminiscent of Boy Scout & Girl Scout accomplishments of our past.
The branding for 2014 was based around a retro video game theme. We created a sweet 8 bit Legend of Zelda map, along with unique retro Nintendo badges. Our favorite parts of the collateral were the sticker and t-shirt designs. The t-shirt designs mimic package design of a vintage video game (brings back memories?) and attendees loved it. A couple years after the 2014 conference, the t-shirt is still what everyone remembers.
WordCamp Orlando 2015 was all about the magic. Our design team drew inspiration from our favorite Harry Potter stories and created custom illustrations, pulling visitors into a mystical forest design straight from a storybook. The iconic orange was carried through the logo—it’s a running theme for Orlando WordCamps—however, in 2015 it’s tucked behind a sorcerer’s hat.
Designing the 2015 website, we kept the fanciful storybook vibe. Our designers found the perfect font and weaved in magical design elements. As always, we followed the foundation’s strict guidelines.
We created a website theme filled with mystique and adventure, so attendees would feel excited about the magic at the theme parks as well as the conference.
Stickers we designed for WordCamp Orlando 2015.
To build excitement for the event, we shot a promo video with Adam Soucie, David Laietta, and our own James Tryon.
The design challenges for WordCamp are the foundation’s specific guidelines. Since these events happen around the world, the foundation sets the ground rules. Everything created must work within the default WP Theme for the event, and the conference websites can’t use any plugins other than JetPack. Accomplishing really cool design within these constraints requires careful planning, but is totally possible.
