Photo by Katie Chin
Completed: Ongoing
Team: USC Annenberg Office of Communication and Marketing
USC Annenberg event graphics
One of my favorite perks of my position at USC Annenberg is access to see the lineup of amazing speakers, and often getting to design the backgrounds or presentations that go behind them in Annenberg’s unique media wall space.
The three-story-tall media wall presents a design challenge: the graphics must be visible for audience members watching from any story of the building, though the top and bottom third can be covered with video, presentations, or event livestreams at certain points of the program. The graphics themselves also can’t overpower the speaker or blind the audience — literally a tall task for a three-story screen.
With the help of the whole creative team, I have figured out what works best for the media wall space — for our audience, for our event photographers, for our brand identity, and for bringing the event to life.
Here are a few of my favorite designs from some of USC Annenberg’s stellar events.
Photo by Katie Chin
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Collaging textures from recent editions of Adichie’s books in the screens behind her as she spoke in acceptance of the 2019 Everett M. Rogers Award.
HBO Conversation Series: These screens were each displayed for events during USC Annenberg’s partnership with HBO. The events featured conversations with HBO’s top talent and producers on the role of diversity in entertainment. Though each event’s screen needed to account for slightly different video specifications, my team and I made sure they had a unified, collaged look that represented each speaker’s many accomplishments. These were some of the first screens I worked on at Annenberg, where I learned that collage could be a visually interesting but not distracting background for many other events.
Photo by Olivia Mowry
Elizabeth Banks: To compliment Banks’ conversation with Dr. Stacy Smith, who leads Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s research on diversity in entertainment, about representation of women in film and Charlie’s Angels, this media wall background highlights the films she has produced and starred in which highlight diverse voices.
Photo by Yannick Peterhans
Dawn Ostroff: For lunchtime events, such as this conversation with Spotify’s chief content officer, the media wall image needs to draw students passing through the building into the forum space, with recognizable logos to pique their interest.
Photo by Olivia Mowry
The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: Over time we have found that using large face images on the screen can be unsettling. This screen solved the problem of how to evoke the topics of this investigative book without using Kavanaugh’s face.
Photo by Matt Lin
ATVN 20th Anniversary: For festive occasions, sometimes a playful illustrated background fits the mood perfectly.
