Amazon Web Services

AWS re:Invent

Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent

Creative Director 2020–2024

6 global properties
60,000+ in person annually, 500,000+ virtual
Multi-million-dollar creative budget
0,000+ environmental assets

Identify opportunity and push boundaries.

AWS re:Invent is one of the world’s largest technology conferences, serving tens of thousands in person and hundreds of thousands virtually. The challenge was not simply to build an annual creative theme, but to evolve a multi-year experiential brand system that could scale across formats, venues, and audiences without losing coherence.

  • Through strong agency partnership and doubly strong internal POVs, evolve the event creative expression while retaining a connection to the organic brand principles.

  • With similar or sometimes reduced budgets, we pushed for new capabilities, new ways of thinking, and new expressions that built on the event’s core concept of reinvention.

  • Never rest for the status quo. Invent new opportunities to delight attendees through community, technology, and surprise.

  • Attendees expect the best experience. From the simplest sign to the comfiest chair, always enhance their journey to build positive memories.

Define the job.

The marketing brief.

Convince 
Engineers, and Business Decision Makers alike

That 
AWS re:Invent is the worth the time, effort, and resources to attend 

Because 
AWS re:Invent is the only place to learn the principles and practice from the latest cloud computing experts and find like-minded leaders to grow your network and business.

The creative brief.

Energy brings energy.

We do not reinvent for novelty. We reinvent to keep it alive.

Each year, evolve the expression. Protect the signal. Carry a consistent color language that anchors recognition while the system pushes forward. From first announcement to badge pick-up, every touchpoint should build anticipation or remove friction. Nothing neutral. Everything intentional.

Design clarity where people need confidence. Design surprise where they are ready for wonder. Create pathways that guide thousands with ease, then leave room to wander, to collide, to play. Make innovation visible. Make scale feel human. Make the experience something you move through, not just look at.

Energy is not decoration. It is direction.

Define the center.

Color, shape, line. Whether inherited or directed, finding the consistent expression within our visual principles continued to be an important part of building a recognizable and distinguished brand expression.

Define the feeling.

The Expo and Village

The gravitational center, tens of thousands of builders moving through product launches, partner ecosystems, demos, and immersive installations. The challenge wasn’t scale, it was coherence.

The Expo had to feel expansive but navigable while the Village had to feel communal, not corporate.

Signage

Spanning multiple properties along the Las Vegas Strip, signage can not be decoration, it has to act as infrastructure.

The goal is to provide visibility at 30,000 feet and clarity at 5 feet by eliminating cognitive friction so builders could focus on what mattered.

Public Spaces

The most important experiences are often unprogrammed. Corridors. Lounges. Surfaces. Transitional architecture.

Defining the feeling at re:Invent means designing more than environments. Public spaces carried emotional responsibility, they needed to feel ambitious but human.

Select experiences.

From immersive environments to wayfinding across Las Vegas campuses, I directed the creative ecosystem that made AWS visible, navigable, and human.

  • Session Cover

  • 2022 Count Down

    2022 Count Down

  • Multi-use Registration Hall

    Multi-use Registration Hall

  • AWS OnAir Production

    AWS OnAir Production

  • AWS Village 2022

    AWS Village 2022

  • Content Hub 2023

    Content Hub 2023

  • AWS reInvent

    2020 Virtual re:Invent

Doing the work.

The website, social, the session catalog, the Expo, the Village, city-wide signage, and public environments were not standalone projects. They were one orchestrated system. My responsibility was to ensure the brand did more than show up. It had to feel coherent, optimistic, and unmistakably AWS re:Invent.

In the end.

The work was not about spectacle. It was about scale, clarity, and continuity. Attendance grew. Engagement expanded. The virtual model launched in 2020 became a permanent global access point for AWS customers. Across formats and years, the creative system held. Attendance grew, engagement expanded, and the virtual model we built in 2020 became a lasting global access point for AWS customers worldwide. Most importantly…

Attendees Showed Up
500,000+ global attendees for the fully virtual re:Invent 2020, establishing a digital-first model that continued throughout my tenure. 50,000+ in-person builders annually across multiple Las Vegas venues, unified under a single experiential brand system.

re:Inventing the system
Built the foundational systems behind re:Invent’s experience, from a redesigned digital platform and content strategy to a scalable signage infrastructure across 7 properties and a modular Expo/Village booth framework engineered for reuse, efficiency, and long-term brand integrity.

Multi-year creative leadership
2020–2024 stewarding re:Invent through digital transformation, hybrid reinvention, and multi-campus physical expansion without fragmentation of brand or experience.

Credits.

My role

Creative Director

The Team

Sara Hendrickson
Lead Copywriter

Cameron Searcy
Art Director - Web

Spencer Shores
Sr. Art Director - Signage

Hiro Seki
Sr. Art Director - F1

Melody Hirsch
Art Director - EXPO

Ty Kreft
Art Director - SWAG & Merch

Keven Thompson
Motion

Cassandra Krul
Lead Motion

Otto Duhnam
Photo Art Director

Agencies

Production Club
Creative Partner

T3 Expo
General Contractor

Opus Agency
Program Management

900lbs
Demo Experiences

Sparks
Production Partner

Colin Young-Wolf
Photograpy