A Graduation for Engineers

Creative Direction

Event Design

Challenge

A graduation full of engineering students, and a photo booth brief that could easily default to caps, confetti, and a congratulations banner nobody remembers the day after the ceremony ends.

outcome

A robotic-arm photo booth with gears, blueprints, and a graduation cap held in a machine grip. Two generic booths stood at the same event. The students kept coming back to this one.

Client

Asia Strategic Holding

Industry

Education

Year

2023

project brief

Auston University, in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University, needed event collateral for its 2023 graduation ceremony: a main photo booth backdrop, dimensional props, and printed photo frames for the day's pictures. The graduating class was engineers. That fact became the entire creative premise. Instead of a booth about graduation in general, this was a booth about who these graduates actually are, built with robotic arms, gear trains, and blueprint grids, and delivered with the kind of production drawings an engineering student would appreciate: every prop dimensioned, every rotation angle specified.

What the icon stands for

What our iconstands for

The mark combines three overlapping ellipses, each colour representing one of STS's three age groups, nursery through to year two. The shape is built on the letterform S and draws from the visual metaphor of stacked stepping stones, which is where the school gets its name.

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Scalable Identity System

Logo Variations

color palette

#823439

Tint & Shade

20% lightness increments

Typography

primary type face

Cooper Hewitt

Hierarchy & Weight

Thin

Regular

Semi-Bold

Heavy

THE ENGINEERS' BOOTH

The class graduating was engineers, so I started from their language rather than the ceremony's.

The wall became a blueprint grid, the gears came out of the university's own blue and yellow brand color, and instead of printing the props flat I designed them to protrude: two robotic arms flanking the backdrop, one reaching in to hold a graduation cap in a machine grip. The moment those props left the plane of the wall, artwork stopped being enough.

Every protrusion needed a real dimension, so the cap went out at 32 inches wide and rotated twenty two degrees clockwise, and I drew the whole set as a spec sheet carrying widths, heights, protruding depths, offsets from the top and rotation angles, so the fabricator could hit the approved render to the inch. Then I ran the same system back down into print, carrying the cap, the gears and the partnership lockup into the photo frames the graduates took home, so the booth and the pictures taken in front of it belonged to each other.

As a Project Lead, I owned the full pipeline from start to finish.

Creative Direction: Defining the visual language, layout, and overall site experience.

Client Management: Leading briefs, presenting concepts, and aligning on direction throughout.

Team Assembly: Sourcing and onboarding the Webflow developer and animator.

Production Oversight: Briefing the build team and ensuring designs translated correctly into Webflow.

Quality Assurance: Balancing visual ambition against site speed, making sure every interaction held up in the browser.