Teen Impact Awards

The Teen Impact Awards, produced by Believe Limited, honors teenagers living with bleeding disorders who have done something for their communities. The 2019 ceremony recognized 75 teens across 28 states, with an “Anaheim's Got Talent” theme — a California riff on the television show.

I was brought in to update the event's environmental graphics from the previous year and design the new ones: the stage backdrop, the honoree quote walls, the timeline display, a step-and-repeat, and a certificate for every single honoree. The work had to be finished, printed and shipped in time for a fixed event date.

• The scale was architectural, not editorial. The main backdrop printed at 144″ × 384″ — twelve feet high and thirty-two feet wide, plus bleed. Design decisions that look fine on a screen fall apart at that size, and a teenager walking on stage in front of it has to look like they belong there.
• Parody has to be affectionate or it's just theft. “Anaheim's Got Talent” needed to read instantly as the joke it was, land as a celebration rather than a knock-off, and still work as the visual centerpiece of a real awards ceremony.
• Representation was an explicit requirement, not an afterthought. The honoree quote walls had to be balanced so the teens featured across them reflected the range of the honorees — which meant reworking the layouts around who was represented, not just how the type sat.
• Seventy-five certificates, seventy-five names. Every honoree's name and award category had to be correct, cross-checked against a spreadsheet, with four judges' signatures placed. One of these is going home with a kid and onto a wall.
• The tone had to celebrate the teenagers, not their diagnoses. The honorees are recognized for what they did for other people. The design needed to keep the emphasis there.
• I would never see the printer. Every file had to arrive layered, adjustable and ready for a production team and an in-house designer to work with after I handed it over.

1. Designed the “Anaheim's Got Talent” identity. Built the parody logo as the visual anchor of the whole event, designed the stage backdrop around it — skyline pulled down low along the bottom so the logo could carry the wall — and carried the same mark onto the front of the podium.
2. Solved the stage as a lighting problem. Reworked the backdrop so the stage lights read as actual articulated lights hitting the logo rather than abstract glow, and added light leaks to give a flat printed surface some depth under real stage lighting.
3. Redesigned the honoree quote walls. Expanded from two walls to three and redistributed the honorees across them, so the teens featured reflected the group being honored.
4. Reworked the full timeline series. Rather than designing the 2019 panel in isolation, I went back through all four panels in the series so the blue blocks alternated across them and the set read as one sequence when lined up.
5. Built the certificate system. Restyled the template — blue-on-blue rim, flat silver outline on the stars — then produced all 75, each with the honoree's name, award category and the judges' signatures.
6. Designed the 8′ × 8′ step-and-repeat. The photo wall carrying the 2019 identity, for the pictures the honorees actually take home.
7. Turned the night into next year's pitch. After the ceremony I rebuilt the sponsorship deck around the event photography, pairing each teen with a line from their own speech — first names only — so a prospective sponsor met the honorees rather than read a summary. The image-and-quote set was assembled as a reusable library for decks and social.
8. Shipped production-ready files. Delivered layered, editable Illustrator artwork at print scale, organized so the printers and Believe's in-house team could make adjustments without coming back to me.

• The 2019 ceremony ran with a complete environmental identity — stage, podium, quote walls, timeline, step-and-repeat and certificates all from one system.
• All 75 honorees, including those who couldn't attend, were represented on the walls and received a certificate.
• The event's own photography and the honorees' own words became the sponsorship deck, so the night paid forward into funding the next one.
• Believe Limited kept hiring across the following nine months: event lanyards for their conference, wall murals for The Science Fair, monthly work-highlight postcards, and cover artwork for their documentary Bombardier Blood.