A Design Manifesto Fuels Innovation and Award-Winning Outcomes
Each year, NeoCon convenes 500 leading companies and more than 50,000 design professionals at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart—serving as the commercial design industry’s premier platform for launching new ideas, products, and conversations that shape the built environment.
To position the event as a cohesive, future-facing brand experience, we developed a unified visual and verbal system that designers could immediately connect with. Anchored in Executive Vice President and CEO Cheryl S. Durst’s design manifesto, this narrative became the strategic foundation for all event and program communications.
Helvetica—a typeface synonymous with clarity, discipline, and modernist intent—was selected to reinforce the manifesto’s purpose. Each word from the manifesto was paired with a color selected for its emotional or historical resonance, creating a flexible design language that could scale across touchpoints. The manifesto appeared in full, in part, and as a repeated graphic motif to create continuity throughout the NeoCon environment.
Helvetica—a typeface synonymous with clarity, discipline, and modernist intent—was selected to reinforce the manifesto’s purpose.
The integrated marketing system extended across print, digital, advertising, signage, wayfinding, apparel, premium merchandise, and even a branded food truck—culminating in a unified experience that strengthened NeoCon’s position as the industry’s most influential design convergence.
How Best of Design Award, 2018
Design Manifesto
Cheryl S. Durst, Hon. FIIDA
IIDA
Executive Vice President and CEO
Design is personal. not political. design dignifies. it does not discriminate. design provides and provokes. it has no prejudice. design heals the heart, replenishes the soul, ignites the mind. design civilizes, not demonizes. design excites and exalts. it never excludes. design educates. it does not repudiate. design has empathy not antipathy. design is culture. design is craft. design is art. design is science. design is history. design is love. design speaks. design listens. design is everywhere. we are design.
