TechOlympics 2025

TechOlympics is an annual student run conference hosted by INTERalliance in Cincinnati - in fact, it’s the nation’s largest student run conference! It is organized, marketed, planned, and run all by high school students with a passion for technology and event planning. It’s been running for over 10 years now, so I was absolutely honored when I was selected to lead the marketing and finance teams in the branding and graphic design for the conference this year. The theme changes annually and is suggested and voted on by students. This year, the theme was INSPIRE!

I began first by creating a sketch dump of potential logos - and trust the process here, these are very early stages! Every year is a graphic design competition, where the winner will be used as inspiration for the finalized logo. I used this design in mind, but it didn’t go far. After reviewing over the designs with Keith Koehne, executive director of INTERalliance, we decided to move forward with the red-purple fire design you see below.

But it needed some changes. Keith showed the design to a handful of students on the ILC board within INTERalliance and came away with the critique that it looks a lot like a red bush. And I agreed. So, I went back to the drawing board to emphasize the fiery shape while also altering the colors - the old ones were a bit too purposeless. After a few more revisions, I came up with this final logo!

Afterwards was creating the branding guidelines. It was important getting this document as concise and clear as possible as they would be used by several different teams I wouldn’t always have reliable contact with. I prioritized fitting as much information in as possible to help with anything the marketing and finance teams would need.

The project ramped up in intensity passed this point. First I needed to create the badges attendees would use to register and check in to the conference. The large red ‘VISITOR’ text was a requirement by the venue, as well as the legal name section. However, to respect all attendees who don’t go by their legal name, I provided a chosen name section that would appear larger and more clear.

One of the more important aspects about the conference was ensuring that all attendees could find their way around the venue to locate the specific panels and talks they wanted/needed to participate in. The venue location was very large with a lot of rooms TechOlympics was not allocated to use. So after a walkthrough of the venue, we created several simple looking posters to keep attendees on track.

The final stretch was completing the motion graphics to get the audience excited for the start of the conference. The first was a 30 minute count down, which was new to TechOlympics this year. I was inspired by video game loading screens, specifically the tooltips or fun facts section most loading screens have. I thought this would be clever to put in front of the audience attending the conference, as it was mostly made up of high schoolers with an interest in technology and computers. Some of these fun facts would also be referenced later in a game of trivia! The 30 minute count down took on many forms, starting from very simplistic visuals where I was just trying to get the timing of the fun facts right, and the rest of the video very quickly fell into place after that.

I was also tasked with creating a 10 second count down that would kickoff the event and get the audience hyped for the conference! I sourced various different stock videos to find exciting and inspirational footage for the students to view and be passionate about. I looked for different ways technology impacts us in our everyday lives, from medical technology, to video editing, to children’s toys, I wanted to pack the wide breadth of the field in just a few short seconds.

That’s everything I did for TechOlympics 2025! Here’s a few photos of the event itself. Thank you for reading!