Elevate Conference Graphics 2025

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About Paylocity:

Paylocity is a software company that specializes in HR & Payroll with many features within it’s app to make the employee lifecycle smooth from hire to retire.

Their Business Needs and Goals:

Paylocity hosts it’s very own virtual HR event that is popular every year in the industry. I worked on the event the previous year and was very familiar with the event, but I had to compete against another designer to get to work on this event again. We had to pitch 2 new concepts for the event visuals and mine was selected as the winner.

Another challenge this year was the event manager was new and was playing catch up to make this event even better than before. The seeds were planted from the previous year and their goal was to increase attendees, sponsors, presentations, and impact for attendees.

The Solution to Their Needs:

My familiarity and return to this event allowed the team to move faster than the previous year. They needed a motion graphics designer to own the creative for this event to give them the graphics and focus they needed to execute on all of their marketing pieces to drive up registration for the event. In hindsight, if the other designer had won the concept pitch it would have made this event more challenging to execute for them because they needed a lot of video work done for this and that designer does not have much experience in video. I worked together closely with the events team putting this event together by meeting with them for weekly check ins and collaborating often on more ideas to hit our goals!

Results:

This event was a game of catch up when it came to the event manager since it was his first year on the team, but he adapted quickly and was an amazing collaborator on this event. I had a great time working with him! The registration rate was slower than the previous year for the first half of promoting it, but as the event got closer and we collaborated on ways to hype up the event. We ended the second leg of marketing it very strong and were able to surpass the previous year’s numbers, again!

Our marketing efforts through the use of email, website landing page, and social media delivered us an increase of:

Registrants by +8%
Client registrations by +4%
Partner registrations by +200%
Attendance by +3%

It was a huge success, a great collaboration with the Events Team, and has design systems built in place to continue to create content that is effective for this event in future years. In addition to that, the ‘spiral’ concept that I created for the event went over so well that they are already planning to use it again for Elevate 2026, which is a very proud moment for me.

This event generated over $700K in revenue.

Concept Face Off

This year the Events team wanted a new visual look for Elevate since the previous year no longer aligned with the direction of Paylocity’s overall brand. So I and another designer had to go head to head and design one new concept each to compete against each other. As well as the third design being a tweak to the designs used in 2024.

I gave them the background behind my thought process for the designs and showed various color executions. For my “Spiral” concept I explained that it was inspired by an abstract representation of the word Elevate. A spiral staircase is what came to mind for me, but instead of showing it from an aerial view, I thought it would be interesting to show it from a side view. That’s how the “Spiral” concept came to life, this shape is ascending and elevating upward. Wrapping around the subject and lifting them in an upward trajectory.

Powerpoint Slide Templates

The first piece that I needed to create was the powerpoint slide templates so the presenters could have time to prepare their content and build their decks for the event early to ensure that the presentations they built were on brand for the event and kept everything cohesive. I gave them many layout types to choose from to present their content. This gave them the base they needed to create their content. After they finished their content, it was sent to me for review to make sure any little blips were cleaned up, but shockingly I only changed 1-2 things in each deck. They did an amazing job and it’s a testament to how well the template deck worked for the presenters.

Zoom Backgrounds

Next I built Zoom backgrounds for the presenters to all have branded and matching backgrounds. Like last year I built a dark and light version of the background, but I also gave them a gradient background. It’s very bright and eye catching, but I know it might be too loud for some people. I wanted people to have options. Each presenter could choose which background they wanted to use so they could stand out on the screen depending on what color their clothing was for their presentation.

Social Media

We had a lot of our efforts on social media to build hype about registration for the event. Graphics included: speaker promotion, general speaker promotion, and various early bird registration reminders.

Attendee Hub & Website Banner

I built assets for the attendee hub. I provided dark and light options for this as well. The team ended up choosing the dark graphics since they pop off the white website background more. The gradient graphic was a web banner for promotion on Paylocity’s company website.

Video Assets

The graphics for this “Spiral” theme turned out beautifully. I love the neon element to the shapes. It really made these animations come to life. I built a countdown for the start of each day, a presentation animation to hold content for pre-recorded sessions, a logo looping animation, and lastly a pre-roll loop to play before the event and before the 30 second countdown.

Emails

We sent many emails leading up to the event to hype it up and remind attendees that they had access to the session recordings for 30 days after the event closed. The gradient banner graphic was an email signature that our internal team was using to highlight the event as well.