When planning recurring events, one of the design challenges I face is balancing recognizability with freshness. For the International Breast Density Workshop (IBDW), this challenge came to life in 2023 and 2025 as the conference moved from Hawaii’s Big Island to Kauaʻi. Each year, the event needed to feel like part of the same program, but also reflect the character of the host island.
As the program manager and designer, I made the call to treat the conferences like “sequels”: keeping the structure, layout, and flow consistent, while allowing the style to adapt to each location. This meant maintaining grids, button styles, fonts, and overall website flow across both years, but updating logos, color palettes, and images to match the hosting island.
Designing for Recognition & Place
For IBDW 2023 on the Big Island, the logo drew inspiration from Kīlauea, the island’s active volcano, paired with a color palette of pink, orange, and brown. These colors tied to both the volcanic landscape and the workshop’s focus on breast cancer research. Photos throughout the website and program materials reinforced the island’s identity.
By 2025, the conference was on Kauaʻi, so the logo and palette shifted to dark green and blue, representing lush forests and the Na Pali mountains. Pink was retained as a nod to breast cancer awareness, but adjusting it presented accessibility challenges: it had to maintain sufficient contrast (WCAG 3:1 minimum) against white and other colors. Photos and decorative imagery were updated to reflect Kauaʻi’s landscapes, but the layout, grids, and user interface elements stayed consistent.
The result? When you compare the 2023 and 2025 materials, it’s clear that these are the same conference — the “hair color” changed, but the identity underneath remained.
Establishing a Flexible Design System
To manage consistency across iterations, I created a mini style guide documenting:
- Fonts and typographic hierarchy
- Button and UI styles
- Grid and layout standards
- Color palettes for each location
This allowed anyone on the team to quickly understand which elements could flex and which had to remain the same. Early on, there was some hesitation about changing the logo each year — some asked, “How will people recognize the workshop if the logo changes?” — but the system ensured that the core personality of the conference persisted.
One particular challenge was designing the Kauaʻi logo so that it felt like a “sequel” to the Big Island version. By maintaining similar structure and alignment, we achieved visual continuity while still highlighting the new location.
Lessons Learned
Working on IBDW 2023 → 2025 reinforced a key principle: brand identity is more than logos and colors. It’s about personality, experience, and recognizability through structure and consistent interaction.
- Visual systems matter: Consistent layouts, typography, and UI elements act as the backbone of a brand across iterations.
- Flexible elements can tell a story: Logos, palettes, and photos give each edition its own character while staying true to the core identity.
- Anticipate challenges: Accessibility, technical constraints, and feedback all influence how much a brand can flex without losing cohesion.
The IBDW 2025 branding demonstrated that a conference could evolve visually without losing the identity that makes it recognizable and respected — a small but meaningful design win that reinforced the value of thinking systemically about visual identity over time.
