FIL City - One Event Identity, Eleven Cities

Overview

FIL City is an event design system and dynamic brand identity, built for Filecoin Foundation’s own events and then given to the broader ecosystem. Events were coming every six weeks and preparing one properly took ten weeks with turnaround time. The system is what closed the gap. Consistent enough that every event was recognisably part of the same family, flexible enough that each one still belonged to the city it was in.

Approach

Think of FIL City as a festival with multiple stages. Each stage has its own thing going on, but the festival brand ties them together. Organisations across the ecosystem ran their own side events under it, doing what they wanted with it while cross-promoting through the shared identity. It also opened a route for sponsorship: the Foundation could fund an ecosystem event on the condition it went up on the FIL City site with the branding in the room.

Same bones, different city

The core stays fixed: a logo built from three circles, the Filecoin logo in brand blue at the centre, flanked by two icons from the host city, a light “FIL” followed by a heavier city name. Almost everything else is open. Each city brings its own colour palette, typefaces, icons and illustration, drawn from the visual culture of the place.

Hong Kong ran on Lato, chosen for its echo of the British typographic heritage still visible on bilingual street signs, with a palette of “tea house green”, “Hong Kong red” and “waving cat gold”. Paris used Wix MadeFor Display for its low crossbars and its closeness to Futura, and icons of the tower, the arch, the macaron. Bangkok took Krub, “Chao Phraya mist” and “golden pagoda”.

Where each city shows up hardest

The icons are where each city shows up hardest. Solid monotone glyphs, flat perspective, drawn with an organic feel, four to nine city-specific ones added to a consistent web3 set so the language stays recognisable. Two of them become the logo. The rest get scattered into festive patterns and run across the environment.

One template, eleven sites

Each city site ran off one Webflow template with a Style Guide page driving every class, so restyling a whole site meant just changing the guide page. The template converted to a static build and ran on NetlifyCMS, deployed through Fleek so the site itself was hosted on the Filecoin network. Anyone in the ecosystem could take it and stand up their own event site.