The Story Behind the NamesCon Brand Changes

Logomark Tagline Date 20181

The past year has been marked by many new developments for the NamesCon organization, and we have just a few more tricks up our sleeve for you! You may have noticed some visual and structural changes to the NamesCon website in recent days. While this is very much a work in progress, we wanted to uphold the transparency and honesty we’ve built within the industry and share the motivation behind these changes as they’re happening.

Defining the goals of a brand restructuring

After joining the WorldHostingDays family in late 2016, we recognized this was a prime opportunity for self reflection and improvement. We’ve used this window to take advantage of the influx of new talent and infrastructure by examining how we could improve our flagship 2018 event in Las Vegas. This process led to bigger-picture ideas for brand growth and development, and a decision to reach new markets by introducing smaller regional events focused on education. (See highlights from NamesCon India).

07 Logomark Tagline Date 20181

If you’re familiar with NamesCon, you know we’re billed as “The Domain Name Industry Event”. While we still hold ourselves to the high standards this reputation demands, adding regional conferences means that “the” domain event has transformed into many events, each with its own local variations. This led us to…

Challenge 1: Define a new tagline to describe our organization.

We also wanted to add a strong visual element to our existing logomark – which we’d refined just two years ago and didn’t want to change again. We needed a design that could scale with the growth of our brand.

Challenge 2: Design a new graphic to incorporate into the existing NamesCon textmark that is quickly identifiable as an asset belonging to a particular region.

Understanding our priorities

The tone, integrity and spirit of our established event in Las Vegas is an integral part of the NamesCon brand, as is the value we provide to attendees through delivering content that examines trends and issues across the entire industry. With that in mind, we decided to rename our annual January conference to “NamesCon Global” – a name we thought to be especially relevant within the context of smaller regional shows.

After reading attendee survey responses from the past two years we know that quality networking is a primary objective for most NamesCon attendees. This overwhelming emphasis on networking made us realize that connection is at the heart of our mandate as an organization. As event producers our job is to connect the dots – between industries, businesses, vendors, and most importantly, people.

Beyond connection, we also aim to facilitate education and awareness about our thriving industry by bringing experts to the stage not just in Las Vegas, but to audiences around the world.

Refining the design

These themes of connection, education, and global reach would ultimately serve as the guiding principles for both our new logo and tagline.

We explored several phrases that might help explain our conference to a new attendee, and ultimately settled on “Master Your Domains” as the best explanation of an individual’s personal objective for attending. You are the director of your own success, the hero in the story, the attendee we’re catering to. The tagline should reflect your ambition and not our own; our role is to simply facilitate your journey.

Color treatments were utilized so that each event would be instantly recognizable, especially as we develop regional conferences year over year. We opted for cityscapes to serve as the background for marketing materials because we wanted to provide visual context for each region rather than just naming a destination.

NamesCon Sideby 1
Colour treatments and the new globe logo applied to two of our upcoming events.

Once we had clarified internally that “connecting the dots” is our M.O., the globe comprised of dots felt like the right choice for our new supporting logomark, and we love that we can tailor the duotone design of the globe to match the color treatment for each event. We felt the completed design struck the right balance between consistency and customizability for all the new events under the NamesCon umbrella.

We hope you’re even a fraction as excited about these new changes as we are, and that these branding upgrades more accurately reflect who we are as an organization. Ultimately, NamesCon is here to help you do better in business. To master your domains, wherever you happen to find yourself at home on this earth.

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