Amrock at the MBA Annual 2019

The MBA Annual Convention & Expo is one of the largest trade shows in the mortgage industry. Working for a company in an adjacent industry, that means my workload gets noticeably heavier when it comes around every fall. This past year, it was held in Austin, Texas – “The Live Music Capital of the World.” It’s no wonder that the MBA saw fit to go with a music theme for the 2019 conference, and Amrock followed suit.

With a theme that offered imagery of tangible things (a trait I rarely have the pleasure of working with), I was really able to sink my teeth into the creative assets for our presence at the conference.

Attendee Bag Brochure:

Size: 14×4.25″ unfolded, 5.5×4.25″ folded
Style: “Circle Locked Gate”
Effects: Soft-touch laminate, die cutting
Production: Foldfactory

The original concept for this asset fell through late into our project timeline; luckily, I had been itching to use Foldfactory as a vendor for a long time and they were fresh on my mind. What ensued that afternoon was mad scramble to run the numbers against our budget, as well as finding a product offering of theirs that I could use to design something that fit within our theme. By the end of the day, I had it all figured out: an approved concept, and a product to apply it to that both fit within our budget and requested turn time.

I know logistics aren’t exactly a design achievement, but considering how many things went sideways at once, I’m proud of how well everything came together in the end.

The design required a fair amount of compositing in order to marry the image assets and our brand elements, as well as to make it semi-photorealistic. The process for the brochure ended up setting the tone for most of the other creative assets I worked on.

Event Landing Page:

This probably doesn’t need much explanation: we needed a landing page for lead collection from the conference. Like we do for most of our single-use web pages, I built it using Unbounce’s landing page builder.

I’m proud of this one: I tried incorporating several of 2019’s visual trends into many of the other assets for the conference, but I was unsure how much of it would be possible via the web. After doing some digging and learning a handful of new CSS tricks, I landed on a design that remained consistent with the rest of the conference assets.

Pop-up Banners:

Size: 47×81″
Production: Vistaprint

Amrock banners MBA Annual 2019

We needed branded signage for an event we were sponsoring at the conference. This was another set of assets that needed an extensive amount of composting to get where I wanted.