Brief
THE BRIEF
HSE's Spark Summit brings together innovators from across Ireland's health service, people improving care from the inside, sharing what's worked. For 2026, NCAD Design Labs needed someone to give that work a shape: an exhibition that could hold projects of wildly different scale and format, physical artefacts and printed material under one visual identity, legible to a room mixing healthcare staff, policymakers and designers.
The brief sat inside a bigger theme: love in the age of technology, before it, finding it, keeping it, and after it. The team chose the last one. Life After Love.
Concept
THE CONCEPT
What every project in the room shares:
Diffuse ideas,
taking shape —
that's iteration.
No project in the room had arrived alone, each one was built from several overlapping points of view: patients, staff, needs nobody sees until someone asks. The circle carries that directly, the shape of a spotlight, of the thing being highlighted, its edges diffuse, its centre defined: an idea still forming, taking shape into something real. The same logic shows up in the type: titles shift orientation, some horizontal, some vertical, so reading them means turning, changing your own angle on the piece.
Process
THE PROCESS
I worked alongside Emma Creighton's curation team at NCAD Design Labs, developing the visual concept and the design decisions that carried it through. Once the purpose of the event and the selected projects were clear, the first task was spatial: mapping out the room, deciding how many stands the exhibition needed and where each one would sit.
Only then did the visual identity start taking shape, round after round of sketches, several graphic directions tested against the same question, which one could actually hold twenty-plus projects of different scale and still read as one coherent show.
The brief sat inside a bigger theme: love in the age of technology, before it, finding it, keeping it, and after it. The team chose the last one. Life After Love.
Once the concept was settled, it had to become a system. The typeface Figtree, modern, clean, geometric, with the same human character the rest of the system was after, carried that structure: its range of visual weights let each template hold a hierarchy, condensing a project's information into limited space without losing clarity.
The brief sat inside a bigger theme: love in the age of technology, before it, finding it, keeping it, and after it. The team chose the last one. Life After Love.
Templates flexible enough to take content of any length, a structure the whole exhibition could run on without breaking down project by project. From there, design became production: files prepared for print, materials checked against the original concept as they came back from the printer and finally installation, the day before the event, moving the design from paper to the room it was always meant to fill.
The brief sat inside a bigger theme: love in the age of technology, before it, finding it, keeping it, and after it. The team chose the last one. Life After Love.
Outcome
OUTCOME
What actually went to print, across four formats:
79 posters and 10 mounted panels, all built from the same template system, all installed in a single day.
