“What you think we are, we are. What you think we are, we are not.”

This sentiment was the origin of our creative idea of duality. Being two separate and opposing things while simultaneously being one single thing is a state that every designer, and every person, can relate to.

The idea acknowledges the internal and external struggles designers experience. The friction between personal and professional, selling work and selling out, the voice inside their head and the polished words they speak.

This year at Design Camp, we asked campers to honor these conflicts, to explore them and to embrace the discomfort through it all.

Our target audience specifically included:

- Working designers looking for professional support and inspiration

- Students nearing the end of their design education

- Designers in career transitions looking for educational resources and insights

- Veteran designers looking to share their experiences and knowledge

The execution pushed our duality theme into unpredictable design territory, a stripped-down campaign for designers, made by designers, rooted in copy. Our expression of duality was manifested in the phrase “subtext to the surface.”

Posters were printed on newspaper-like material that when held to the light, one could see content from the opposite side of the poster showing through.

Each mailer piece featured a custom stamp reading “copy paste copy paste” to reinforce the hunger for individuality.

Guidebooks were printed in two different directions, requiring the viewer to physically shift the book 180 degrees to continue reading.

Our workshop “Mixed Blessing: Looking at the Good and Bad of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality,” acknowledged new technologies that challenge our definition of “reality” are entering the world in new formats every day. It’s no longer a question of if we will have the potential to live in multiple realities, but when.

Value added to brand:

Client quote: “The creative work by Ten Thousand Design had a major impact on the success of AIGA Minnesota's annual Design Camp. Working with their team was absolutely organic and collaborative. Following our desires to a T, while consistently surprising us with the kind of creative thinking every client hopes for but rarely receives, Ten Thousand Design took the project objectives and (maybe literally) ran with it. The final product was a meaningful, clever and downright moving identity and campaign for Design Camp, which will be remembered by many for years.”

Achievement against brief:

The team took Design Camp to a new space in the design world that it had never gone to before. The client was incredibly impressed: “What you and your team have done has by far been the best contribution to camp.”