A beautiful idea can become a rather ugly problem when somebody prints it. Katie Otis learned this in the hours before conference registration opened, when the production and installation of her agency’s designs had gone wrong. She had not checked the vendors closely enough or supervised the finished work carefully enough. She told the client, then spent the night doing what she could to put things right.
There is something revealing about choosing that episode when asked about a professional failure. Otis could have offered a harmless anecdote about a rejected concept. Instead, she described the moment her responsibility extended beyond the screen. Her verdict was brief: “It’s all in the execution!” A conference wall is an unforgiving place to discover that approval and completion are different events.
“It’s all in the execution!”
Katie Otis, on an event production lesson, 2021
A company built one introduction at a time
Otis founded Design in Mind in 2002. The San Jose business began as a one-woman venture and grew through referrals and relationships. That origin matters. When recommendations help bring in the next assignment, the experience of working together becomes part of what a company sells. The finished design has to please people; so does the process of getting it made.
Her education includes San José State University, which she attended from 1995 to 2000. Before starting the agency, she worked at Yahoo, where she gained experience in environmental design. Her eventual specialty in events arrived through an existing client asking the firm to take on a large San Francisco conference. Familiarity with the client’s brand gave the team a starting point. A workable budget gave them room to explore.
Today she carries the titles founder, CEO and creative director. The agency works across branding, marketing, websites and events, with clients ranging from startups to large companies and Bay Area nonprofits. The range is considerable, but its published working principles are refreshingly ordinary: listen carefully, take care over quality and expect plans to change. Anyone who has commissioned creative work will recognize the usefulness of that last provision.
When the logo needs its own floor space
The possibilities of that event practice are visible in Automation Anywhere’s Imagine conference. For its 2019 identity, Design in Mind worked with mirrors and imagery that invited people to consider what lay beyond immediate sight. At the venue entrance, the idea acquired a particularly substantial form: a mirrored logo, 14 feet tall, turning slowly and reflecting the skyline and the people arriving.
A logo usually has to survive being made smaller. This one had to survive becoming architecture. The pleasure of the object was its invitation to participate: attendees could see themselves and their surroundings in the same surface that carried the event’s identity. It supplied a reason to stop, look and take a photograph. The conference had effectively given its branding a place in the crowd.
The assignment also traveled. In 2019, the series reached London, New York, Tokyo and Bangalore, with imagery adapted to local cityscapes. Different venues brought different layouts, suppliers and constraints. Keeping the family resemblance while making each setting feel considered was a practical design problem, repeated across borders. For Otis’s agency, creative freedom came with a considerable amount of coordination.
A rotating mirrored logo at Imagine 2019.
A graphic identity becomes an object in the room.
The weather gets a vote
Another event offers a useful companion to the mirror. For CloudBees’ DevOps World, the agency created a visual environment populated by stingrays, mushrooms and other unexpected characters. Each represented a role within the developer community. Jenkins, the familiar character associated with the event’s heritage, appeared throughout, giving the new world a recognizable inhabitant. Software conferences are allowed a sense of humor.
The work spread across signage, presentations and stage graphics. Then, in the final hours, bad weather forced the event online. The team returned to production to adapt what it had made. A venue could be dressed, an installation supervised and the room ready, yet the plan could still change. The weather had declined to attend the design review.
For a founder overseeing this kind of business, flexibility has an exact meaning. It involves people reopening files, changing formats and meeting another deadline. The DevOps World identity could carry into a digital setting, giving the team something usable when circumstances moved. It is an example of why the agency’s promises about adaptability belong in the production schedule as much as the pitch.
An editorial reading of the event, employee and nonprofit projects.
Persuading people who already know the company
The audience is sometimes inside the client’s own organization. LinkedIn’s InDay gives employees a dedicated day each month to connect, collaborate and innovate. The program had been running since 2010, but newer employees were unfamiliar with its history and participation had declined. A tradition can become difficult to explain precisely because the people who remember its beginnings assume everybody else does, too.
Design in Mind refreshed the logo, developed messaging and built a campaign spanning video, signage, templates and an asset library. The task was to make the purpose clear to managers and employees working in different arrangements. Here, the central question was what would persuade someone to make time for something already on the calendar. Familiarity alone had stopped doing the job.
A donor, a volunteer, a parent with a flyer
Across the nonprofit work, that concern with who will actually use a design becomes more pronounced. Ploughshares wanted to reach younger, more diverse audiences while continuing to hold the confidence of existing supporters. The organization’s mission, reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, brought an obvious seriousness. Its identity also needed to make room for people who had not previously seen themselves as part of the conversation.
The agency’s assignment included naming, messaging, a logo, guidelines and marketing materials. A rebrand of this kind asks an organization to negotiate between continuity and invitation. Existing supporters need to recognize something they trust. New supporters need to see a reason to enter. The designer has to make that negotiation visible without turning the result into a committee meeting in typographic form.
San Jose Youth Symphony presented a different audience puzzle. Its musicians were young, while parents and donors supplied essential support. Its marketing budget was small and volunteers made many of the materials. Design in Mind adjusted the existing logo and palette, improving legibility and introducing brighter versions of familiar colors. It also developed typography and an icon library. The changes respected an organization with roots going back to 1951.
The most consequential deliverables may have been the least theatrical: adaptable templates for concert posters, audition flyers, brochures and social posts, accompanied by straightforward brand guidelines. A parent volunteer should be able to make the next announcement without commissioning the whole identity again. The project was supported by a $25,000 gift from Design in Kind. That bought the orchestra a system it could continue using.
Giving the next person something that works
Children Rising, formerly Faith Network of the East Bay, needed to change its name and identity without losing the goodwill accumulated over 18 years. Design in Mind donated its services, retained familiar elements of the palette and illustration style, and developed a refreshed visual identity, marketing templates and fundraising materials. The Oakland nonprofit needed help with a major undertaking while its own team continued handling everyday communications.
There is a personal connection behind the agency’s work with this organization: Otis’s LinkedIn profile lists volunteer branding, website and marketing work for Faith Network beginning in 2004. It also records a 2017 St. James Park outreach effort distributing 100 bagged lunches, 100 care packages and winter coats. In the 2019 Christmas season, she and her team volunteered with Sacred Heart Community Service. The practical work included sorting clothes and preparing food boxes.
Design in Kind gives the agency’s donated and discounted creative work a formal home. Its published historical figures include $228,000 in pro-bono services from 2013 through 2022 and $76,000 in nonprofit discounts from 2016 through 2022. Those figures describe services contributed by a business and its team. They also describe hours that could have been allocated elsewhere. Generosity in an agency has to find space on a calendar.
The founder leaves room for the team
Otis has been direct about how she understands her place in the company: “My company is really run by my team.” She describes her contribution in terms of setting goals, relationships and experience. That is a useful perspective for a business that began with one person. Growth requires the founder to become comfortable with work whose authorship belongs to several people.
The agency’s advice during a 2020 downturn was similarly concrete: stay in contact with clients, consider flexible payment arrangements, attend to internal projects and equip employees properly. It encouraged staff to take home their office chairs and monitors. Such details rarely appear in the glamorous account of creative leadership, although the person spending the day in the chair may have a strong opinion about their importance.
The mirrored logo and the volunteer’s template sit comfortably in the same career. Each asks whether a design can keep doing its job once somebody else encounters it. Otis has built a company around those encounters, from a conference entrance to a local concert announcement. The beautiful idea still matters. So does the person who checks what happens when it leaves the studio.