STARfest

STARfest was RIT's annual sci-fi convention, hosted by Space-Time Adventures at RIT (STAR). It took place every spring (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), and featured sci-fi performances, panels, games, and special guests like Nathan Fillion and Michelle Czajkowski.

In 2015, my goal was just to expand the original 2014 Cantina into a larger event that could then grow into a convention. I handled creating most of the digital media, and some of the print materials as well. It was our first year running a mini-convention of that scale, so we had little direction other than piquing the interest of the sci-fi fans in the RIT community.

In addition to continuing to prepare food and music for the Cantina (the latter leading to the crafting of a massive spreadsheet to tune the ideal playlist¡), we brainstormed and implemented ideas from 2015-2018 like lightsaber duels, running the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator and Spaceteam, filling the game room with our favorite sci-fi games, screening so-bad-they're-good old sci-fi B movies in addition to recent hits, featuring local musicians and game creators, and even adding escape rooms.

Taking the lead on design efforts, I went through a few iterations of the logo in 2015, but fell back on the simpler cursive design that didn't add so much visual complexity as to clash with the STAR logo. While Photoshopping all the various ships into the gas station design was a fun challenge (albeit one I would have liked to take another stab at if I had the time), the “tear in space” is my favorite of my 2015 designs.

I am also proud, as both a designer and developer, of the STARfest website. Recognizing Tumblr would be a vital social platform for a sci-fi convention in 2015 regardless, I built the site as a Tumblr theme so non-web-dev team members could make changes themselves using Tumblr's customization interface. As the developer, I had more control than any WYSIWYG site builder would have allowed us, but as the lead designer of the site, I was dogfooding my code changes, ensuring designers could adjust all necessary parameters from the Tumblr interface as I implemented my design. The customization system allowed the site to transform for each year's aesthetic without requiring code changes. In fact, the 2018 website revamp was to use the new Tumblr default theme as a base (with its updated built-in implementation of Tumblr's keyboard shortcuts and mobile behavior), and not because of any issues with the existing site's customization system.

Read more about my more extensive design work for STARfest 2016, STARfest 2017, or STARfest 2018 on those respective pages.

Beyond my primary roles in advertising and design, I played a major role in planning the overall con layout each year to best use the available space for what we had planned, and my level design experience also came in handy determining what signage would be most needed and where. I also specifically helped plan the game room layouts, including having a featured Nintendo Switch area in 2017 (when STARfest fell right after the console's launch), fleshing out the VR section of the game room in ways such as getting a few Star Wars-branded Google Cardboard cases and featuring works like a synesthetic creator's VR synesthesia experience alongside more standard VR games, and personally reaching out to ROC Game Dev members working on sci-fi games. Additionally, I reached out to local musicians combining music and technology in distinctive ways, including Al Biles playing alongside his GenJam A.I., Charlie Roberts live coding synthesized music, Michelle Harris creating live visuals accompanying music, and BC Likes You + Koog playing chiptune music inspired by sci-fi franchises.

Though I stepped down from the planning committee after STARfest 2018. My final act for STARfest was taking some unused design concepts to assemble the 2019 Pride Month profile picture. Back in 2012, I don't think I could have imagined running a convention (let alone creating one), I was fairly un-versed in marketing and PR, and I had only begun to figure out my queer identity. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, STARfest 2020 never happened, and STAR's leaders graduated without successors, so that Pride Month graphic became the last ever STARfest post and forever its profile picture, which puts a bittersweet bookend on my time with STAR and STARfest.

Making STARfest happen each year involved many hours-long planning meetings and late nights of work coordinating, writing, coding, drawing, editing, scheduling, printing, constructing, testing, and distributing, not to mention all the effort of physically setting up and running the event. But through our efforts, we successfully created that incredible pocket-universe-esque reality that makes fan conventions so special, that feels completely apart from regular life. It was one of the grueling things I have ever done, and also easily one of the most rewarding. The work it took to make happen made dancing with everyone at the Cantina at the end of the day that much more joyous.