CLIENT
The Cipher Brief
year
2023-Present
role
Creative Direction, Experience Design, A/V
The Cipher Brief Threat Conference is the premier national security event in its category: an invitation-only gathering of 250 leaders from the public and private sectors, running across three days of sessions, workshops, and exercises. It has operated since 2016. The people in the room are cabinet officials, intelligence community leaders, defense technology executives, and senior journalists. The standard they hold events to is set by the most serious rooms in Washington and the most well-produced conferences in the private sector. When I came to the conference in 2023, the visual and experiential execution didn't match the caliber of its audience or its programming. The design was staid in the way that DC events often are — functional, serious, but not particularly considered. The physical environment in particular, the stage set, the furniture, the way speakers were framed on camera, had received less attention than the agenda. I came in to change that.
2022 Conference
2024 Conference with new staging and seating
Informational Screen Element before a session on Iran
The design direction for the Threat Conference needed to feel authoritative and precise — closer to a serious think tank or a high-level policy forum than a startup conference. The visual language is more restrained, the palette more institutional, the typography more formal. The brand lives within the Cipher Brief system but occupies its own tone within it. The bigger change I pushed for wasn't graphic — it was physical. The stage had been set with large, heavy leather armchairs that looked uncomfortable on camera and made it harder for speakers to move, gesture, and engage naturally. I advocated for replacing them with lighter, more elegant chairs that could be repositioned for different session formats and read cleanly on broadcast. The screen graphics moved from static PowerPoint titles to a designed system with consistent typography and motion that emphasized the editorial seriousness of the given topic. Both changes are about the same thing: a speaker who looks and feels good on stage delivers a better session, and a better session is a better conference.
I own every designed surface at the Threat Conference: stage graphics and screen content, signage and environmental branding, printed materials, web, social, advertising, and the A/V operation during the live program. The through-line across all of it is the same principle that guides the brand system: seriousness that doesn't tip into austerity, and refinement that doesn't tip into decoration. Running the A/V live during the program is where the design and the event become the same thing. The lower-thirds that introduce a speaker, the transition slides between sessions, the way the screen responds to each moment of the program — these aren't elements that can be finished and handed off. They have to be operated, which means anticipating the rhythm of the event and making real-time decisions that hold the visual logic together under pressure. That operational knowledge has compounded over three years and is as much a part of what I bring to this event as the design itself.
Lanyard and badge
The Threat Conference is now in its tenth year. The design has gotten more refined over the three years I've been on it, but the more significant change is the production fluency — the A/V operation is tighter, the asset pipeline is cleaner, and the physical environment reads the way a conference at this level should read on camera and in person.