KU IT: CHECK 2021

The Conference on Higher Education Computing in Kansas (CHECK) attracts information technology professionals from colleges and universities from across Kansas. This year the conference was held online for the second year in a row, due to the pandemic.

KU IT hosted the conference using the Hopin platform, and Zoom. I was part of the planning committee, working to promote the conference. I helped with the website and provided feedback in other aspects of planning, but my biggest contribution was the creation of graphics for branding and for use in our virtual spaces.

I started working on the logo last fall. I looked at a variety of fonts to come up with an idea of how I wanted the logo to look, and I ended up creating the logo type as individual, custom letters and numbers. The logo is characterized by thick letters and the logo as a whole is a nearly solid block, due to the interaction between the "E" and the (second) "C".

I made versions of the logo where the word "CHECK" and the year were on the same line, some where they were stacked, and others that used a check mark inside the zero in "2021". I wanted to find a way to make the logo uniquely KU. That's when stumbled upon my favorite version, which was also the one chosen by the planning committee. The final version featured the name of the conference on an incline, one side of a long triangle, to symbolize "the hill" (Mount Oread) that KU is known for. The year is cut out of the hill, contrasting the name.