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To me, brand work is more than building an image for an entity, but rather a conceptual playground to use my experience and love for multiple mediums to create something new. My process always started with writing which naturally transformed into building conceptual narrative as creative wrappers in brand work.

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A large chunk of this process happened at BUCK. I came and stayed here because of the company’s diversity of medium and thought.

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MK: BUCK’s work often has a high level of craft and artful, illustrative design—an approach that many studios see as challenging due to time and scalability constraints. How does BUCK repeatedly manage to bring these projects to life?

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GK: We are a bunch of nerds and makers. The people at BUCK thrive in finding creative solutions to conceptually dense problems by putting pen to paper right away. We don't dwell on the issues, we make art and see what path forward emerges through design.

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The way we look at work scalability and production challenges is finding the core creative concept that drives everything forward. That one sentence and frame that everything can be built around. It makes decisions easier, and throttling work more effective.

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MK: Let’s talk about Meta Connect—what is it, and how does branding for an event differ from a typical brand identity project?

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GK: Connect is Meta’s annual developers conference. It is a tentpole event for Meta and outlines their positioning and visioning for the coming year, and also sums up what happened in the previous year.

Event branding, especially tentpole event branding can be quite tricky. Brands are looking to facilitate their current image and positioning, and also advance with a feeling of forward momentum, and invention. Tentpole events become an opportunity for strategic visioning, which can be tricky as you are running topline and visuals, in parallel. It takes a nimble team that ebbs and flows with the process, any rigidity causes lots of pain.

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MK: The BUCK team has partnered with Meta on this project for 3 years in a row now, what are some of the challenges and upsides of being given a similar brief each year?

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GK: The biggest challenge is the desire to do better, bigger, cooler each year, and that can be daunting. However because Meta is constantly reinventing itself at the speed of tech, each year has a new and fresh pov that gives us a lot of new levers to pull.

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Another challenge is to not get mentally stuck in default thinking of previous years ideas. This is also where BUCK is positioned well, we have lots of different creative minds that take briefs in unexpected directions. Our diversity of talent means we can always put fresh eyes on a job, and we just know how to get weird.

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MK: What was the overarching concept behind the visual identity? 

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GK: This year the overarching concept was: “Your world expanded.” We approached this through the lens of Meta’s developer tools that allow the creation of new and unexpected things.

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We try to approach conceptual ideas like this through simple formulas. In the context of “Your world expanded” — we created a theory of simple geometric shapes that are morphed and changed into hyper-natural objects through a simple container. Creating a sense of evolution and expansion through a change of texture and form.

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MK: BUCK’s done a lot of work in the Augmented Reality and VR space, were any of these mediums incorporated into this project?

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GK: Mixed reality is a staple of Meta’s product offerings, so communicating the feeling of mixed reality and VR is always top of mind for an event like Connect. In past iterations we developed visuals that were directly linked to mixed reality through filters in Instagram. In 2024, we leveraged it as an abstract idea to draw from, rather than a direct or literal link.

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MK: These tech events can be very secretive in the lead-up to protect new product launches, was there any missing context or novel workflows that needed to happen to maintain that secrecy? 

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GK: Our work to brand Meta Connect 24 is about creating a larger conceptual wrapper for the entirety of the event. As such the specifics of a singular product launch does not tend to get in the way of the larger vision. Working with Meta’s creative teams, we zero in on a concept that aligns to the event holistically, and because of this, we can stay more gestural.

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That said, if there is a big shift in product offerings, it can influence the bigger creative idea. How that is filtered down to us varies, but it will still usually come in the form of a brand idea or theme, rather than product specifics.

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MK: What were some of your favorite product reveals from the actual event?

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GK: Being a big fan of mixed reality, the new Orion glasses blew me away. To me, this is the sort of product that will be an inflection point for most consumers. I wonder how they will work out during daily activities like driving or standing on a train platform. We will have to retrain our behavior in day-to-day spaces. I can’t wait!