Sean Brosnahan




Blackstone CEO Conference

03Event Branding & Identity, Concept
Summer 2024
Advised by Danielle Greenberg





Background

 Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. I joined Blackstone’s firmwide design studio as a Visual Design Summer Analyst from June to August 2024. As my capstone project, I concepted brand identities for the 2025 CEO Conference, an annual event gathering CEOs of Blackstone’s portfolio companies.

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The Event

 Blackstone’s CEO Conference is an event to share insights on the rapidly changing business landscape. Over two days, 200+ portfolio companies CEOs come together for panels, discussion, and networking.



The Opportunity

 The Conference’s branding evolves every year, providing the design studio an opportunity to create new branding that excites CEOs about the company.



Guiding Values

 After research of the event and its stakeholders, I narrowed on some guiding values to focus the identity on:

Unity: show how the companies tie back to Blackstone
Innovation: reflect the innovative insights from the conference
Trust: express how Blackstone has continued to deliver for their companies
Prestige: evoke excellence


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The Objective

 Use shape to represent Blackstone’s portfolio companies and how they “Build with Blackstone,” using existing brand messaging for a new purpose.


Key Art

 Tiles represent the portfolio companies and their connection to the Blackstone ecosystem, referencing Blackstone’s rectangular logo. These “towers” of tiles are rotated on different axis for two reasons: to establish a visual variety and enable different functional uses. Therefore, the tiles are not merely an aesthetic design element but can be a container to place imagery, a bullet to showcase agendas, and much more.

  


Walk-On Storyboard

 This is a storyboard of an animation to display speakers as they walk on to begin their session. The animation starts out as a complete set of tiles. Then, the animation zooms into the tiles while the tiles open up their angle towards the camera. This continues until the tile lays flat, exhibiting the session title and speaker info.






Learnings

 Throughout this project and my broader time with Blackstone, I learned two things: how to design for an audience far from yourself and how innovate under a brand guideline. Since I am not financial advisor or CEO, I had to learn how to empathize with different audiences to meet their needs and expectations. In addition, I learned how to create branding under an existing brand guideline — gaining experience with the balancing act of pushing guidelines to their limits.



b.sean@wustl.edu
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