Lisbon's port built the slave trade for centuries. Centuries later, Black Innovation Alliance arrived at Web Summit with sixty-five leaders, board members and staff, not to sell software but to pioneer ideas about Black entrepreneurship in tech. The year before they had mostly shown up. This time they needed a beacon: a space that held their impact and made them findable in the noise.
Web Summit fills a room with thousands of booths selling software, but BIA came to pioneer ideas instead. The job was making a two-year-old organization read as substantial in a place with no reason to look, so we built vertically, pushing the logo high enough to be found from anywhere on that floor. The booth became a place where people who belonged nowhere else suddenly had somewhere to land.
We started where we had to start: standing in the space and tracing the footprint at full scale in an empty warehouse, because a booth that reads clean on screen can collapse the moment you inhabit it. From there we built it in SketchUp and drew the entire submission package, knowing that designing from Denver for a build in Lisbon meant every choice had to answer questions we would not be there to resolve. The beacon was the hardest call to defend. We pushed the BIA logo high above the booth and fought for it when it got questioned, because Web Summit runs on tech, not on diversity, but that height changed everything. It read across the hall, became a place to point people toward, a meeting point for anyone who needed to find their people.
Planned in SketchUp, blocked out full scale, built in Lisbon.
The BIA logo had never been painted before. We painted it by hand and let the color bleed into the impact stats behind it, turning a chart into something urgent and alive. That painted face is part of their visual language now, and it started on that Lisbon floor.
We arrived with a film about BIA's impact and a script so the team could tell that story the same way twice, but no way to follow the people we met. When one hundred fifty tees and totes started moving fast, we cut a second video on the floor asking people to leave their details before they left wearing the merch. The swag was already a beacon. The video gave it teeth.
“As a young organization, we've been able to build a strong brand which is difficult to achieve early on. Additionally, they've helped us produce and maintain an aesthetic that is second to none. We could not recommend SJL more highly. They are the best.”
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