Ginkgo Ferment

Type: Art direction | Creative strategy | Brand awareness | Experiential design | Graphic design

Client: Ginkgo Bioworks

Year: 2024

Creative Collaborators: Alexandra Ting, Quinn Berkman, Sierra Margolis, Nina Garcia, Grow Marketing

Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology platform company that offers services to engineer biology for clients. Ferment is Ginkgo’s annual event that brings the biotechnology community together to provoke new ways of thinking about biology, and inspire new connections and collaborations to strengthen the field.

For Ferment 2024, I collaborated with Ginkgo’s Creative Studio from the beginning brainstorms of the desired vision, to overseeing final executions. As art director, I guided the direction of visuals, event photography, and presentation decks. I also designed some assets such as the newspaper, buttons, and holding screens—see more about each project below!

Ferment Newspaper

Type: Creative direction, brand awareness, graphic design

Media: InDesign, print

Client: Ginkgo Bioworks

Year: 2024

We wanted something visitors could take away as a memento/recap of the event and decided on a newspaper. I spearheaded this project from content gathering, creative direction, and designing. Included in it are ads highlighting partners at Ferment, a welcome essay, snippets of articles from Grow magazine, and a science-centered crossword puzzle. When fully opened, the inside acts as a poster, or in a lot of cases, a really cool photo moment!

Ginkgo Ferment Newspaper 2024 – spreads_Page_2.jpg

Ferment Buttons

Type: Creative strategy, connections, brand awarenss

Media: Illustrator, Photoshop, buttons

Year: 2024

Client: Ginkgo Bioworks

Knowing how to start a conversation with someone at a conference can be intimidating. We wanted to combat this by creating conversation starter buttons—each with a topic relevant to visitors at Ginkgo Ferment and within the synthetic biology community. And they worked! In fact, they were such a hit, our visitors wore them to several other non-Ginkgo events.

Note: Half of these buttons were designed by Nina Garcia.

Interstitials (Holding Screens)

Type: Presentation, Introduction

Media: Figma

Year: 2024

Client: Ginkgo Bioworks

Designed around 30 interstitial cards that displayed who was presenting on stage next and created templates based on if it was a panel, lightning talk, or break. Pulled design elements from the newspaper to continue visual themes.