TENWEST 2026 Identity

TENWEST is the Southwest’s largest entrepreneurship and creativity festival, a branded house of many sub-events under one identity.

When I joined the project in 2025, the brand had real equity: a set of shapes and a palette the audience already recognized, but it lacked standardization. With decisions made by eye, several near-identical shades stood in for single palette colors and no fixed relationship held the shapes to one another. My task was to simultaneously impose a system without discarding the equity that already existed and bring some freshness to the brand.

Now, the shapes are derived mathematically, and a single variable governs everything. Every shape derives from the side length of the square, so proportions stay fixed wherever and whoever builds them, on any substrate or touchpoint.

The color palette resolves to one canonical value per color, and the use of color is semantic rather than arbitrary. Before settling the relationships of colors to shapes in the system I generated the full space of compound shape illustrations and curated it down. I authored and applied these rules in 2025, then evolved the system for 2026.

Four shapes derive from one variable, S, the side length of the square. Each holds a fixed ratio to every other and never scales independently. This is the fix for the central inherited problem: shapes that had been resized by eye now resolve to one rule.

To understand what the system could produce, I used Illustrator scripting to enumerate every compound shape across the eight-color palette, resulting in 2,296 shapes spanning the full combinatorial space. From this pool I selected the strongest marks and defined exclusions, forbidding combinations that used the colors in ugly, inappropriate or inaccessible ways.