Role
Co-creator, Executive Producer, and Design Lead
Co-created, co-executive produced, and piloted Duolingo's largest event, Duocon. My role was to create all event identity and branding and lead design and experience production to deliver a successful event in a different country in just 2 months. I more specifically led the community experience and design production of the event, while helping coach guest speakers, planning event details and overseeing all branding, as well as audio/video/technical production.
Summary
We created Duocon, an in-person event to celebrate Duolingo, culture, and language
Our team of 3 wanted to honor our community members and start to “own” the language conversation. We did this by creating an in-person conference that reached language and education enthusiasts all over the world in just 2 months. After the success of the pilot, the event has grown to become its own team at Duolingo, reaching annual audiences of over 200K people with the presence of world-renowned guests and MCs, like Trevor Noah, Luis von Ahn, Helen Zaltzman, Sohla El-Waylly, Lera Boroditsky, Nicole Holliday, Tom Rocks Maths, Angélique Kidjo, José Andrés, and Patton Oswalt.
What we are solving
We don't have a strong, human presence in the language community
Duolingo is not “just a game”: there is so much research and serious science behind the fun. We wanted to find a way to celebrate our community while simultaneously elevating the Duolingo brand within the language learning space. We wanted to connect language learners and enthusiasts to each other and to Duolingo by running a delightful and culturally diverse educational conference.
Iteration and development
CEO press tour in London? Put a bird on it!
Our team believed it was possible for the Duolingo brand to become a bigger authority in language learning and strengthen its voice in EdTech by leveraging our community and facilitating conversations around language and culture.
We decided to take the owl to England to run a pilot conference around the date Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was scheduled for a press tour in London. It was the perfect time and place to experiment with this. Most of our volunteer community was in Europe, and they would be excited to join and even travel to London, especially knowing Luis and Duolingo staff would be there to give talks and interact with them. This would in turn help enrich the experience of members of the press, since they would be invited to parties, see the hype and love around Duolingo, and get the opportunity to interview fans.
The question that remained was, how do we delight attendees while remaining true to Duolingo’s brand guidelines and values? With just three of us, and 2 months to prepare this event, time would be tight if we were to make it to London. On the design side of things, I would need to create, design and produce all branding and materials from scratch, and have it all ready to go in a different country. Our best bet was to keep things fun and simple, including our main objectives:
- Duocon should look and feel like a quality conference
- Duocon should clearly be a Duolingo event, respecting and reflecting the brand, mission, and values
- People should enjoy themselves and feel compelled to share their experience
- Attendee social media posts and images should reflect and connect to the brand and the event
The High Valyrian guy was going to be there
To help with branding and event planning, we decided to choose themes. We chose four “broad” ones (community, inclusivity, love of languages, duo) which we felt were important to the event, and that would make sense to re-use in potential future editions.
Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, from HBO's Game of Thrones. The character is a speaker of High Valyrian, a language created by George R.R. Martin and developed for the TV show by conlanger David J. Peterson, a guest speaker at Duocon 2019.
The other two were more specific to this event: High Valyrian is a language course we had just refreshed and relaunched on the app earlier that year ahead of the final season of Game of Thrones. The creator and developer of the language for the TV show, David J. Peterson, was going to be a guest speaker. England was the host country.
Themes
community|inclusivity|love of languages|duo|high valyrian|england
We needed unique but recognizable branding, so I adapted Duo the owl
Even though we had a tight timeline, we wanted Duocon to have its own identity established before designing the conference materials and experience. A unique identity would make the conference and any related parties and communications clearly a Duolingo event, while still its own thing.
The logo featured a happy Duo outline, along with “Duocon” written in Duolingo's custom feather font. This would be easy to adapt for use on light or dark colors, and a 1-color logo is especially helpful for creating swag in a time crunch.
The outline of the owl is recognizable, looks distinct from the main brand, and balances the playfulness of the mascot with the serious nature of some topics and talks. The embedded hashtag claims ownership of the word on social media, and serves as a reminder for participants to share. The end result is a flexible and simple logo, clearly linked to Duolingo and adaptable to future events as they happen around the world.
This is the logo I created for the conference
Production
Here are some branded items I created, in context
A real Duolingo sentence becomes a conversation starter inspired by England. I asked David J. Peterson, the creator of the High Valyrian language for HBO’s Game of Thrones, to translate this sentence so it could be included, since he was a speaker at the event. He created the word “sugar” and added it to the language because of this tote! This will forever be my go-to fun fact.
Badges can do so much more than tell others your name. In our case, we used them as a tool to promote conversations and inclusion. I created simple badges with room for self-expression. Guests added languages they speak/are learning, and special stickers that indicate a high streak, technical worker, guest speaker or ambassador status. The badge was one of the most shared items from Duocon on social media.
Events have programs, but in England they have programmes. Little nods to our host country could be a fun recurring quirk for future events. In this case, this meant details such as a "programme" title and adding local tea and jam to our swag bags. The program consisted of a custom folder, a booklet including the schedule and speakers, sharing instructions, a badge decoration key and a Duolingo-style floor plan of the venue.
Grown-ups enjoy temporary tattoos more than you’d think (especially at bars). At an evening kick-off party, activities like a “get inked” table gives guests the opportunity to physically "join" the spirit of the event and connect with others. We had bartenders, press, executives, and even people who came to the event alone applying these to their skin and committing to having fun. I designed these with multiple skin tones in mind, and included everything from our logo and mascot to our well-known streak flame icon modified with the High Valyrian word for dragon fire, "dracarys."
Photo booths give guests thoughtfully branded mementos to share and keep. I created props and arranged a photo booth in the evening that gave you instant prints, and another one during the daytime event that automatically printed anything scraped from social media with the #duocon hashtag. Bonus points if your very large company mascot shows up to photobomb.
Sure, we could just give away t-shirts, but why not use them as an opportunity to help our guests make new connections? “T-shirt tokens” were made of very thick green-border card so you could write on them while mingling. The card required an attendee to ask any person they met at Duocon a couple of questions to receive the Duolingo t-shirt. We had attendees, including self-proclaimed introverts, tell us how much they enjoyed this mechanic, and how it helped them make new connections and enjoy the event even more than expected.
Staff tend to get approached at events with more fan ideas than they can keep track of. We wanted the community to feel heard, and our colleagues to have somewhere to direct people who wanted to share their thoughts. The solution was a simple feedback tree with custom “leaves” shaped like Duo for guests to write on, with dark/light green sides to make the tree look more interesting once up. We then took these leaves and hung them up on our prominent gray UX wall back in HQ, grouped by theme for all staff to reflect on when grabbing snacks (last picture).
Other gifts included stickers, free Duolingo subscription cards, notebooks, and Duolingo’s first green mug. We needed to recognize community members with symbolic prizes at the kickoff party, and we would not have time to create trophies, so I found a local soap creator who hand-crafted soaps shaped like our in-app currencies (called lingots and gems) to include with certificate and gifts. They were travel-friendly and a big hit. This group of images were pulled from social media, demonstrating a bit how attendees displayed their goodies.
Results
We did it, friends! A delightful get-together where even execs have fun on a modest budget
Duocon exceeded our expectations. Not only did our team of three hit all objectives on a modest budget, but our surveys showed high praise for organization and appreciation for the work that went into the details. Over 90% rated both the kickoff party and the event itself an 8/10 or above.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect from the weekend, but honestly, I had a great time. The whole event was planned so meticulously. All the talks ran exactly to time, neither over nor under. There were no projector faults or catering issues or timing issues or anything else. All of the staff had clearly worked so hard to put the weekend together and were so passionate about what they were doing: that effort and commitment made for a fantastic experience.”
Leo, attendee, “There is Something About Leo”
Execs loved it, gave us more budget, and asked us to go bigger
Our CEO and CMO, and Head of Community considered the project a success, and asked us to plan a much larger version for the following year. Duocon 2020 was on track to host 1000 guests in NYC until the COVID pandemic required an online pivot.
Duocon grew to become an annual conference with its own team at Duolingo. Its next editions had to move online due to the pandemic, and its latest editions accumulated 200K unique live viewers and 500K views at 7 days each. The later versions featured renowned comedians and academics, and became a driver for announcing exciting company developments and upcoming product updates.
Full house, positive reviews, and more people watching online
attendance; the free events were "sold out" and we had a waitlist we were generous with (meaning we let a few more people in)
delighted; that's how many attendees rated both evening and day events an 8/10 or above
estimated viewers, including over 100K live impressions on both our streams and our guest streamers