The FIL Events - Lisbon, Paris, Bangkok

Overview

The FIL events were Filecoin Foundation’s own community conferences, run alongside the industry’s biggest gatherings (Web Summit, EthCC, Devcon) to capture their energy while giving the Filecoin ecosystem a dedicated space to connect, hear from builders, and engage with the project’s direction. Each needed an identity as polished as the conference it ran beside, produced on an in-house creative budget and timeline.

Approach

Creative direction ran across the full environment at every edition - brand, stage design, signage, wayfinding and all event collateral - plus motion direction for the recap films: briefing the motion team on narrative structure, tone and pacing, then reviewing cuts to shape the final output.

A system that toured

Three cities, three audiences, one identity that had to survive the travel. What carried between editions was the spine: the production standard, the identity system, and the recap-film pattern set in Lisbon. What got rebuilt each time was the calibration - every city’s crowd wanted something different from the room, and the design flexed to meet it while the brand held. Lisbon set the template, Paris refined it, and Bangkok adapted it for the most technical audience of the three. That discipline is what later made the series worth codifying: a system that has already survived three cities is a system you can hand to a fourth.

FIL Lisbon - 2022

The first FIL event ran during Web Summit week 2022, timed to capture the energy of the world’s largest tech gathering while giving the ecosystem a dedicated space of its own. The visual language had to carry both community warmth and technical credibility for a developer-heavy audience, and prove the Foundation could run its own events to a high standard, distinct from a conference booth. The motion pattern set here - a briefed narrative arc, not an afterthought edit - became the template every later recap followed.

FIL Lisbon 2022 - recap film

FIL Paris - 2023

Running during EthCC week, Europe’s largest annual gathering of Ethereum developers, Paris had to command attention in a city hosting dozens of competing side events while staying authentic to the Filecoin ecosystem rather than generic web3 conference fare. This was where the system tightened: a more disciplined visual language, more considered use of space, and a stronger line between the event identity and Filecoin’s broader brand direction. The emphasis shifted from establishing a look to refining one.

FIL Paris 2023 - recap film

FIL Bangkok - 2024

Devcon 2024 was the largest gathering of Ethereum developers in years, and its audience was what set Bangkok apart: a crowd that came for signal more than marketing. FIL Bangkok had to stand visually alongside the major protocol teams and read as native to that moment, so the visual language, drawn from Filecoin’s brand system, was adapted for a denser, more technical crowd - less persuasion, more substance. Sixty-seven deliverables went through the tracker for this one event - spatial and stage graphics, print, POAPs, speaker cards and the recap film.

FIL Bangkok 2024 - recap film

Outcomes

The series made FIL events a recognisable fixture in the ecosystem calendar, with its own identity and production values, distinct from every competitor activation around it. The recap films did double duty as documentation and social content, keeping each event circulating in the Filecoin community long after the week ended, and made the case for motion direction as a standard part of the event brief. The series was eventually codified as FIL City - an open system, published for ten cities, that any community can use to run an on-brand Filecoin event without central design support.