Facebook needed help producing materials for its 2018 F8 developer conference, including an evening mainstage presentation, several breakout sessions, and additional social media graphics. But the stage's seven sliding, two-story-high presentation screens were still being built...and the speaker list would not be settled until a week before the event.

Because my product design work allows me few chances to tackle large-scale event graphics (and because I'll take any opportunity to escape a grim Seattle winter), I went to Facebook's main campus for several weeks in 2018. During the period before the speaker list was finalized, I helped the marketing leadership flesh out the basic technical requirements:  expanding on the design system suggested by the brand team and eliciting specifications for the screens from the AV team so that we could build presentation templates for the other designers. During the two weeks preceding the conference, I talked with potential speakers about the most exciting ideas and technical concepts in their drafts and produced explanatory animations and video in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, and Keynote as they finalized their presentations. I capped my stay with two days in the bowels of the San Jose Convention Center, generating social media graphics and watching as our work came off without a hitch.