Brand New Conference is a two-day event on the development of corporate and brand identity projects by some of today’s most active and influential practitioners from around the world.

This year’s identity is based on a cliché but we liked where that cliché took us so we went with it: New York is a “Concrete Jungle”, ergo we are going to use concrete. This wasn’t conceived as a metaphor but as the literal, core ingredient through which we would standardize all the materials.

One style that we thought we could expand on is the high-contrast sans serif with its calligraphic/chiseled structure. As a way to further channel the cacophony that New York can be we decided that instead of choosing just one font or type family we would use a bunch of high-contrast sans serifs together. We chose Chap (Black to be specific) from Schick Toikka as the primary font and we added Hoefler & Co.’s Peristyle, Typotheque’s Valter, Fatype’s Beausite, and Frere-Jones Type’s Bosca and Bosca Compressed — that are not yet available but we got to take out for a trial spin.

For the 2017 edition of the Brand New Conference, UnderConsideration took inspiration from Chicago’s iconic landmark, Cloud Gate, or more commonly referred to as “the Bean,” by Anish Kapoor. The distorted look was meant to imply that the type was reflected off this public sculpture. Read more about this year’s identity on underconsideration.com, and about previous editions also on Fonts in Use.

For the 2016 edition of the Brand New Conference, UnderConsideration took inspiration from the rhinestone-studded clothing and bold typographic music posters of its host city, Nashville, Tennessee. As UnderConsideration explains, the historic Hatch Show Print led them to a wood type inspired look:

Hatch Show Print and their woodtype typographic exploits that have helped promote and build the visual expression of Nashville’s music scene. […] We did not want to imitate the stacked woodtype aesthetic because that’s too easy and not necessarily original but we couldn’t ignore it completely. […]

Our concept for the logo was taking our now well-recognized "BNCONF" shorthand name and treating each letter like a suit to be adorned. We needed big, chunky letters to be able to fit in more decoration and that’s where the woodtype element comes in. After thorough vetting of various black-weighted fonts we found our hero in Behemoth — designed by Dave West and digitized by Martin Wenzel — from House Industries’ Photo-Lettering typesetting service (and available for rent from Fontstand). Behemoth has a large volume and some beautiful, curvaceous details that give it plenty of personality.

Read more about the design of the conference at Brand New.

UnderConsideration translated the design of the original hardcover edition of Lucha Loco down to a smaller paperback format. The typography is changed from the previous edition, using the exhuberant Carmen Fiesta typeface from Typerepublic.