Chicago Ideas brings together speakers, performers, and public audiences across multiple venues for a week of civic conversation. The challenge was to translate the brand into physical spaces like stages, banners, lecterns, and signage across the Cadillac Palace Theatre, Vic Theatre, Morningstar, and Museum of Contemporary Art.

The design system is built to illustrate how ideas spread. Pipes connect nodes across the stage environment, forming a neural network in yellow and black that reads at distance and rewards a closer look. The yellow dot system extended beyond the three venues into citywide advertising.

The stage model was developed early to test scale and proportion before anything went into production. What worked on screen had to work behind a speaker, under stage lighting, across many very different rooms