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The DesignThinkers 2022 website is now live

We hope we've created such a seamless website experience that users won't even notice how simple their interactions on the website are while still easily discovering the speakers and sessions, finding information that helps them plan for the event and learning more about the RGD in general.

- David Han Director, Design Experience, Nurun

The RGD is pleased to launch our DesignThinkers 2022 website designed and developed in collaboration with DDB Canada and Nurun.

“We were excited to be involved with this year’s DesignThinkers for many reasons, the first of those being our deep respect for the RGD as one of Canada’s preeminent design organizations. 2022 is yet another year of new norms for all of us and we wanted to build a website that would drive conference engagement and ultimately help to bolster the RGD’s mission to raise the bar for the design profession as a whole,” offers David Han, Director, Design Experience, Nurun.

The branding by DDB Canada was the starting point to guide Nurun’s website development process. It was crucial that the Nurun team effectively translate the vision of the conference branding into the online experience in terms of design as well as messaging. They used an iterative design process beginning with insights into user needs and stakeholder vision, continuing to concept development, refining along the way until an optimized version was produced.

While the process was in line with a typical digital development lifecycle, the team had some learning opportunities in the form of feasibility assessments. From time to time, a planned feature would end up requiring more time invested than originally scoped. In those situations when they needed to re-evaluate and decide whether to deprioritize other less essential items or rethink the feature entirely, the iterative process worked flawlessly.

The theme for the 2022 conference, conceptualized and designed by DDB, is Defy.

“We love the boldness of the website and the elements of surprise and delight added by the animations. The theme and the branding gave us a lot of room for creativity. We have incorporated unexpected elements across the website to really embrace the ‘Defy’ personality. The use of iconography sprinkled throughout is one of our favourite touches,” explains Cassandra Bader, Client Partner, Nurun.

“We hope we’ve created such a seamless website experience that users won’t even notice how simple their interactions on the website are while still easily discovering the speakers and sessions, finding information that helps them plan for the event and learning more about the RGD in general. Ultimately, we hope that the website entices new attendees to sign up for the conference and benefit from all that DesignThinkers has to offer,” says David.

DesignThinkers is a two-day conference with presentations, conversations and social activities featuring visionaries on a range of topics including exploring branding, design process and design trends.

DesignThinkers 2022 takes place in person at the Vancouver Playhouse in Vancouver May 31 to June 1 and at Meridian Hall in Toronto on October 27 and 28. For other, there is also an option to participate virtually via streamed presentations, virtual networking sessions and other interactions taking place on our online platform.

Registration for Vancouver is now open. Super-advanced early bird rates end April 1. (Registration for Toronto will open in May.)

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