Designers and long-time friends Dava Guthmiller and Arianna Orland wanted to cultivate a community of designer, artists, and creative thinkers. Their brainstorms on how they might accomplish this led to their founding the In/Visible Project, a series of small-scale salons and the one-day, one-track In/Visible Talks conference that will be held in San Francisco on January 11, 2018. “We wanted to have conversations about the art of design,” Dava says. They want to make the invisible visible.

Walking their talk, Dava, who is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of branding and design agency Noise 13, and Arianna, Founder of Paper Jam Press, set aside a weekend for collaborative creativity, and the Project’s distinctive logo came out of that process. “We said, ‘Let’s have some fun dipping things in paint!’” Dava says. They already had a Pinterest board with ideas and inspiration for the event, and that’s where the “in-your-face” colors—the yellow, hot pink, and bright blue—came from. After they each spent $50 on items purchased at a dollar store, they got down to some seriously fun dipping. “It was totally part of the whole In/Visible spirit,” she says. “We were doing things because it felt great, it was just fun!”

The paint-dipped mouth quickly became the top contender for the first year’s branding. “The project is about talking, communicating, sharing,” Dava says. “It was perfect.” From photos they took that weekend, they did some initial drawings. From there, the Noise 13 team took over with the branding and design of a series of doodles, collateral, signage, merchandise, and website. “Whether it was critiques or concepts, we really tried to get everyone in the Noise 13 office working on this,” Dava says. “It’s very much a team effort.”

This collaborative spirit of creativity is highly contagious—come “catch” it at the conference on January 11!