CLIENT
The Cipher Brief
year
2025
role
Creative Direction
The Cipher Brief had an established conference — The Threat Conference — that drew policy makers, intelligence professionals, and defense industry leaders. NatSecEDGE was a different audience: technologists, investors, and founders working at the intersection of national security and emerging technology. The conference needed to feel like it belonged to that world, not like a sub-brand of something older and more policy-focused. The design challenge was differentiation without disconnection. NatSecEDGE still lived within The Cipher Brief's universe and needed to feel related — but it had to signal something sharper, more forward-facing, and more comfortable to an audience whose frame of reference is closer to a tech conference than a think tank.
Early draft of visual language
Animated Elements
The first direction I explored leaned into military imagery — black and white photography with color overlays that revealed elements progressively. It was visually interesting but it pulled toward the same aesthetic territory as the existing Cipher Brief brand. It didn't feel new enough for what NatSecEDGE needed to be. The direction I landed on was more abstract and more technical. The plus and minus symbols became the primary motif — simple, universal in technology and electronics, and directly connected to the Edge concept of the conference name. They function as texture, as framing devices, as punctuation throughout the system. The typeface stays within the Replica family that anchors The Cipher Brief's main brand, but the mono weight gives it a different register — less editorial, more terminal. Glitch animations in motion elements reinforce the technological framing without overclaiming it.
The speaker introduction animations are where the visual language is most fully realized. Each one uses the + and – motifs as structural elements around the speaker's name and title, with glitch transitions that land at the moment of introduction. For a conference about the technological edge of national security, the moment a speaker walks into the room matters — these animations make that moment feel like it belongs to a system, not a slide deck. Beyond motion, I built the full conference asset suite from the ground up: branding, badges, signage, web, on-screen graphics, and all print materials. Every piece works from the same visual logic, which meant that when assets needed to be produced quickly under event pressure, the system was defined clearly enough that decisions were fast.
Staff Badge
Title Animation