On September 12-14th, 2022, we participated in the Global Genes Rare Patient Advocacy Summit held in San Diego, CA. We were brought on by Travere Therapeutics, one of the event sponsors, to create a graphic recording for their booth attendees.
The graphic recording was created to center around event attendee’s replies to the question:
‘What does RARE mean to you?’
The attendees of the Summit were a mix of rare disease caregivers, doctors, medical researchers, family members of rare disease patients and the patients themselves.
Travere wanted to create an attractive visual focal point for their booth to invite participation as well as create conversation within the rare disease community.
Details About Our Graphic Recording Experience With Travere Therapeutics
For the graphic recording itself, Travere supplied a stand alone (framed) two-sided triptych on a table at the front of their booth area. On the top of the panels, RARE FAMILY REUNION was evenly displayed to invite the attention of the attendees.
The story behind the title was an homage to the fact that the attendees had not been to an in-person event in over 2 years. Angela, my assistant graphic recorder, was also there to facilitate conversation/responses from the attendees coming to the booth.
The event attendees shared personal stories about their rare disease experience which helped us develop more meaningful visuals.
For instance, one little girl grabbed a pen from the table, wrote the name Ronan in the middle of one of the panels and just walked away. Angela went to find the little girl to get the story on the name.
After speaking with her and her mother, we found out that Ronan was her little brother who had a rare disease and he died before she was born. Ronan’s mother helped create the visuals by telling us some of his favorite things: the color blue, wearing feather boas and eating cheesecake.
For each reply, we created meaningful scenes or symbolic drawings that would best support the word(s) the attendees gave to us. We had plenty of space to work with since the triptych was two sided. For the colors, Travere had various brand colors to work with so we chose to stay mostly within their color scheme for text and drawings.
We had so many attendees who were open and willing to share their definition of RARE that we were backed up a little with the drawings. People would come back to our booth later just to see what we had drawn for their responses! It was an exciting experience 😀
For the final visuals, Travere wanted to display the panels from the triptych (they could be removed from the frame) in their main office located here in San Diego, CA.
We really enjoyed getting to work with the Travere Therapeutics staff and meeting everyone at the Global Genes Rare Advocacy Summit. We definitely walked away with so much knowledge and appreciation for the rare disease community.
If you’re interested in talking to us about Graphic Recording at an upcoming event of your own, contact us! We will set up a call and see what’s possible.
Thanks for reading!
Nick and Angela