In Korea, November 11 is a special holiday like Valentine’s Day that is called “Peppero Day” – named after chocolate covered snack sticks that resemble straight lines (or the number 11). The written date 11.11 looks like four Peppero sticks next to each other, hence the name.
Because the Jeonju-North Jeolla KOTESOL conference was to be held on “Peppero Day,” one of the leadership team suggested the conference theme be: “Prepare-O Day” – since it’s a cute play on the original holiday name.
With this theme in mind, I set out to design a poster (among other things) that showed this relationship. Here’s an original Peppero box next to my first design for the conference posters.
Flyers
From this initial concept, I developed flyers to distribute to “save the date” for the conference.
Posters
Building from this initial design, I created four more boxes to showcase the conference’s four main speakers and their topic titles. I used a different font and color for each box that I tried to make reflect the speech topic.
I used this image for the Facebook Event cover and the website header, and I also rearranged the “Prepare-O” boxes for the poster and booklet (below).
Booklet
The booklet is 12 pages long and contains each speaker’s abstract and bio, as well as a list of the conference sponsors, the leadership team, and a teaser for the (then) upcoming December Workshop.
Boxes
In addition to these designs, I thought it would make for a really unique event if we actually created these “Prepare-O” boxes. So, I created the full packaging design for each box, got them printed, and taped them around existing Peppero boxes that we bought for the event.
Family boxes
Not to leave my family out, I also created boxes for each of them for the holiday, then wrapped some Peppero in their own designs and gave them to them after the conference. I chose colors for them that were either their favorites or matched their personalities.
Website
This event was the first KOTESOL event I created a custom website for. I spent some time running through an online class and built the site in Node.JS and Angular. I made a similar website later for the 2018 Conference as well.
The Conference website is live at this address.
Or, download a PDF with a screenshot of every page here.
App
In addition to the Website, I also tried to create an attendance taking app that could be used at all subsequent KOTESOL events. I introduced it to the audience at the December workshop and we used it a few times, although there are still some bugs to work out.
It was built with ExpressJS and Angular, and is supposed to use Socket.io for real-time chat, but I was unable to get it working with my webhost (Dreamhost) by the time the workshop began.
The programmed app can be found at this address.
The images below are the original design.
