Foam unveils undulating identity for an IBM conference in full

When people say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” they’re usually referring to the kind of illicit debauchery that can only happen in a city built for the purpose of persuading tourists to part with their hard earned nickels and dimes. But Frank Sinatra’s old stomping ground isn’t just a place to sink 15 dollar Budweisers in front of a Celine Dion tribute act: 19,767 meetings and conventions were held in Las Vegas in 2017.

If you were in town earlier this year, you might have spied something fascinating going on as Berlin-based design wizards Foam Studio infiltrated Vegas with an ambitious, and beautiful, identity for the 2018 IBM Think conference. And it’s that identity we can show you in full today.

To bring that to life, Foam – the commercial wing of Berlin studio Zeitguised – was enlisted by branding agency Athletics to develop to develop a series of interpretations of the computer giants’ “Think” wordmark. “We loved collaborating with athletics, who had a clear vision for the bigger picture but gave us the freedom to develop our own ideas within their concept,” Foam’s Henrik Mauler told us.

The work was conceptualised around the ideas of intelligent self-organising systems and matter which were shaped by information flows.

“We wanted the visuals to be a reflection of a provocative, flexible, and practical system that asks us all to think,” says Foam co-founder Henrik Mauker. So with that in mind, we asked him to gather the Foam team around a big table to consider the videos that made them think really, really hard in recent months.

The results were… intriguing. There was a reality-reframing TED talk by Donald Hoffmann, 3D printed hovercrafts, solar-harnessing projects in the deeps of the desert, Japanese master craftsmen who really know how to make pots, transparent leather jackets , puzzle-solving MIT students, log cabins, and partly accidental vases. Which, you’ll agree isn’t the usual assemblage of things you’ll find in Vegas.