AfroTech Activation + Off the Grid Party

Art & Design Manager/ Design Lead, Nov. 2026

Using surveillance design in art direction for a booth exhibit and a “no phones” event at a tech conference.

M4BL recently attended AfroTech 2026, a conference geared towards Black professionals in tech spaces, aiming to engage tech professionals in conversations about AI’s impact on Black communities, focusing primarily on data centers and hypersurveillance.

Off the Grid Sample Flyers - vertical 3.png

My charge was to craft a booth design that honored M4BL’s stedfast politic, as well as collateral for the party that would appeal to AfroTech’s crowd, and make the two cohesive.

Inspiration

“Anti-surveillance” for the feel of anonymity
& autonomy.

A key aspect of the content the team was sharing was about how AI supercharges how companies cankeep tabs on us, with or without us knowing.

With the increasing popularity of “surveillance design” and augmented reality interfaces, our team subverted the concept to champion “privacy”, utilizing pixelation and faux data to round the concept out.

An analog approach

I’d been tracking a longing in the zeitgeist to go “analog”, almost an anti-digital angle in the midst of our most recent technological revolution. This looks like moving away from clean typography and polished lines, and I specifically leaned into that when creating the wordmark for the party/event series, “Off the Grid”.

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Deliverables

The Logo

I went with a simple ink bleed effect for the wordmark; this effect also shows up in the other text throughout the marketing collateral. I also moved the wordmark “off the grid” in a literal sense, shifting some words and letters above and below the baseline to give more analog identity to the characters. Finally, whenever applied to marketing material, I blurred the vector just enough to give it a sense of actually bleeding into the graphic.

The background symbol I kept simple to signify “no service”, since there were no phones, and allowed the wordmark to do the heavy lifting.

The Event Flyers

My favorite part of this process was convincing the talent/DJs to lean into the privacy angle for promo. Miss Milan, who is the tour DJ for Grammy-award winning are Doechii, was fully committed to the bit as our headliner, and the rest of our lineup leaned into it as well.

The Booth Design

Using the inspiration and existing content I created as a baseline, I worked collaboratively with the Senior Graphic Designer around what the booth needed, and they took the concept and ran with it, creating the booth’s main structure while I focused on the language and the organization of the messaging. Pictured in the carousel are the images of the booth as a mockup, in various stages of construction, as well as some closeups of the booth itself.