OuterEdit Created the Conference Identity & Event Experience Design for Design Futures Forum 2025
DesignSingapore × OuterEdit — Singapore Design Week 2025
DesignSingapore Council
Singapore Design Week 2025
Design Futures Forum has long been the design industry's most anticipated annual gathering in Singapore — a keystone event of Singapore Design Week that brings together designers, educators, technologists, and industry leaders to explore where design is headed and why it matters. In 2025, DesignSingapore Council invited OuterEdit to reimagine the conference from the ground up: not just to design a key visual, but to create the entire conference experience — identity, environment, collateral, motion, and partner curation.
The brief asked us to give the forum a fresh, distinctly human lens. In an era of accelerating change, we wanted the visual language to feel less like a corporate conference and more like a genuine design conversation — layered, tactile, and alive with curiosity.
The visual identity system we developed draws from analogue media and mixed-format textures, creating a richly physical feel that set Design Futures Forum 2025 apart from the clean digital aesthetics of most conference branding. Three thematic systems were built around the forum's three programme pillars — Emerging Tech, Sustainability, and Care — each with its own visual language, colour system, and set of textures, while sharing a cohesive typographic and compositional logic across the full experience.
The conference was held at the historic Victoria Theatre, and every touchpoint — from physical standees and directional signage to presentation templates, motion graphics, and social media — was designed to carry the identity across the space with consistency and warmth.
The visual identity for Design Futures Forum 2025 embraces a different lens on the future — one that is human, layered and tactile. It draws from the textures of analog media and mixed formats to reflect the complexity and depth of our design stories.
Emerging Tech is represented through an abstract, atmospheric lens — where electric blue tones and fluid forms evoke futurism, motion, and continuous evolution.
This green texture represents Sustainability through the structure of a leaf — highlighting systems of support, interconnection, and regeneration.
Design for Care is represented through the emotional warmth of orange tones. The blurry texture adds an atmospheric feel, while the hands ground the image in human connection.
A Visual System Built for More
The identity wasn't designed for a single wall or a single moment. It was engineered to move - from a 9m × 3m stage screen to a tent card sitting at a lunch table, from an animated social post to a printed programme booklet, each surface asking the system to do something different without losing the thread. The layered, tactile quality of the three thematic worlds — the electric blue atmospheric depth of Emerging Tech, the cellular green structure of Sustainability, the warm human warmth of Care — had to hold at scale and hold in miniature.
On-site, it appeared in textured standees and directional wayfinding that guided guests through the building without breaking the spell. On stage, it became motion — animated graphics that opened and closed each session, giving the day rhythm and continuity. Across social platforms before, during, and after the event, it evolved into a living visual conversation that carried the spirit of the forum well beyond the walls of Victoria Theatre.
Designing for a 160-Year-Old Room
Victoria Theatre is not a blank canvas. Built in 1862 as Singapore's first Town Hall and one of the oldest surviving civic buildings in the country, it carries the weight of a century and a half of public life — speeches, performances, civic debate, and cultural memory. Hosting a conference about the future of design here was, in itself, a curatorial act: the most forward-looking conversation in Singapore's design calendar, held in its oldest surviving public room.
Every design decision had to earn its place in that context. Rather than imposing a graphic overlay onto the architecture, we worked with the building — letting its proportions, its colonial-era grandeur, and its patina inform how the identity landed in the space. The "peekaboo" mood banners were conceived as moments of discovery rather than signage: glimpsed through archways, half-revealed around corners, they invited guests to look and find rather than simply follow. The modular welcome structure at the entrance — which shifted function throughout the day, from arrival kiosk to photo opportunity to informal gathering point — was designed to feel handmade and adaptable, in deliberate contrast to the formal permanence of the architecture around it. The conversation between old and new wasn't a tension to smooth over or cover up. It was the entire point.
What the Future Tastes, Looks and Feels Like
Curation at Design Futures Forum 2025 wasn't just about filling space or crowd control; it was about sharing a point of view. If the forum was asking what design's future might hold across technology, sustainability, and human care, then the experience in the room had to reflect that too: not just in the talks on stage, but in what guests touched, tasted, sat on, and smelled when they walked through the door.
The 14 partners we assembled were chosen for their ability to make abstract ideas tangible. Studio Wilt transformed the venue with botanicals that were part of the design, not decoration — floral arrangements made to be redistributed as take-home bouquets, ensuring the experience continued beyond the room. Natalia Weaves installed a textile work at the entrance that quietly shaped how guests transitioned into the space, using craft as a threshold. MORNING served coffee with the seriousness of a design discipline. XTRA's designer furniture on stage reframed what a conference chair could communicate about the conversations happening above it. And Fogo Fungi's mushrooms — woven into cocktails, mocktails, and floral displays — were perhaps the most literal expression of the day's theme: a living organism, quietly doing the work of regeneration, showing up at a design conference about what comes next. KosmodeHealth's nutrient-rich noodles, prepared by Courtyard by Marriott, extended that same thinking to the lunch experience. The future, it turned out, was edible.
Studio Wilt
Studio Wilt's creative use of botanicals turned the forum into a living gallery and florals from the arrangement were made into take-home bouquets for guests.
Natalia Weaves
The textile installation created by Natalia Weaves at the entrance welcomed guests and subtly guided them into the venue to begin their experience.
(Photo credit: BCP Media)
MORNING
MORNING’s dedication to serving quality brews delighted many guests!
Fogo Fungi
The mushrooms from Fogo Fungi brought a unique and sustainable touch to the forum, enhancing the floral arrangements, cocktails and mocktails!
XTRA
The designer furniture from XTRA anchored the stage and elevated this year’s conference stage from all the previous years while helping to create a welcoming space for meaningful dialogue and exchange.
KosmodeHealth and
Courtyard by Marriott
The nutrient-rich, planet-friendly noodles from KosmodeHealth and prepared by Courtyard by Marriott were a hit with the guests! Delicious flavours and thoughtful sustainability were brought to the forum experience.
(Photo credit: BCP Media)
Planning a conference, forum, or institutional event with greater ambitions? OuterEdit is a certified B Corp creative agency specialising in event experience design, creative strategy, visual identities for events, and brand experience — from concept and curation through to every physical and digital touchpoint. Based in Singapore, working regionally.
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