The Past, Present, and Future of Braided Solidarities

the brief

Asian-Indigenous Relations Collective (AIR) is a Vancouver organization working across the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown to spotlight — and teach — the shared history of Asian and Indigenous communities. in September 2025 they held “The Past, Present and Future of Braided Solidarities,” the largest national conference on Asian–Indigenous relations to date.

as creative director, i led the visual identity across every touchpoint — the conference website, lanyards, brochures, and posters — directing a team of two visual designers, a UX/UI designer, and a developer toward one identity that could be both informational and symbolic.

the problem space

how do you build one visual identity for a national conference that holds two cultures — Asian and Indigenous — honestly, and still reads, to a wide audience, as solidarity and interconnection rather than two things set side by side?

mood board

as i do with any project, i started by gathering visual fragments that felt like the event. i had the room to set the direction, and i wanted interconnectedness at the front of it. we built on AIR's existing design system rather than inventing a new one — which kept the conference and the organization speaking the same language, and saved us from starting at zero.

because the conference was about two communities meeting, the board pulled from both — elements from each culture, gathered into one place.

ideation

we began with the desktop site. most attendees were community members, and most of them would read the information on a desktop, so the first round was mostly about layout.

making room for both

in our weekly syncs i flagged that the Asian elements were starting to overpower the Indigenous ones. we worked out how to bring in Coast Salish culture and landed on basket weaving and whale imagery — the whale is a common figure in Coast Salish stories — and we consulted someone outside the team to make sure we weren't flattening any of it into stereotype. the final direction grew out of figure 6, the version that held both communities most evenly. we used orange as the primary colour to keep the ongoing work of Indigenous communities — making their histories and their pain visible — in the foreground.

brochure design

once the site had a shape, i moved to the brochure covers. the early sketches were a place to try on very different styles and structures; once i'd explored, i pulled it all back inside the design system.

two languages, two palettes

a good portion of our attendees were Chinese seniors, so we prepared a translation — and that shaped the book, because the type had to carry Traditional Chinese characters.

you might wonder why the brochure uses a different primary colour. i chose darker tones on purpose: i wanted each physical piece to be its own entity inside the larger system. nothing had to be identical across mediums — many of the printed touchpoints kept their own character — but set next to the website, the whole thing still read as one.

design–dev handoff

to keep the design intact through build, we put together real documentation: a typography system spelling out every style and hierarchy, SVG versions of each visual element so they could scale and animate, and responsive mobile layouts for the different breakpoints.

that prep mattered. the site leaned hard on animation and on cultural motifs that had to stay crisp and consistent at every size.

reflections

leading this taught me how much cultural sensitivity is the actual work, not a step inside it. holding two distinct communities well took constant conversation, outside consultation, and a lot of iteration.

and working this closely with a team — weekly syncs, design reviews — reminded me how much room you have to leave for feedback and course-correction, especially when the elements on the table carry this much meaning.