Xerocon is one of the world’s most inspiring and innovative in-person events for cloud accounting leaders.

The Xerocon events are an annual series of accounting industry conferences held across major global cities

In 2022 Xerocon hosted over 6,500+ attendees across events in London, Sydney, and New Orleans

The events help push significant market activity for Xero, with a share price rise from $80 to $92 in 2022

The events are sponsored by major financial services companies, hoping to align themselves with the Xerocon brand. Previous examples are: Stripe, Paypal, Expensify, Go Cardless, and Amazon Web Services

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Crafting engaging event content with the Xero leadership team

For eight years I supported the Xero executive leadership team, crafting beautiful and engaging content for their keynote sessions at Xero's own Xerocon conference and beyond.

In my role, I oversaw the design of all keynote slide presentations, defining the styles, animations, and templates for keynote sessions, which went on to influence ancillary breakout sessions and other events throughout the year.

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A slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentation
A slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentation

Working with presenters to capture their ideas, and create consistency across all presentations

During the process I worked directly with global executive leadership to storyboard and plan their talks, creating visual stories to bring their messages to life, often creating several iterations of flow and design execution until things felt just right.

My role here was truly end to end. During the months leading up to each event, I worked with local audiovisual crews to determine screen details, presentation sizing, event showruns, and more. This ensured our show day was on-brand and ran as smoothly as possible.

A slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentation
A slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentationA slide from a Xerocon presentation

Complex concepts, told one build at a time

One of my superpowers during this process was creating highly cinematic animations. Not only were they beautiful, they were powerful storytelling tools. The animations helped presenters step through complicated stories, without disrupting the flow, one build at a time.

My tool of choice for these presentations was always Apple Keynote. Its ability to handle high-resolution graphics, produce smooth animations, and handle large-format screen sizes made it the right tool for the job. Using Keynote also enabled the team to make minor edits to content and flow almost up to showtime. This was critical for some events where announcements, acquisitions and product releases were shifting by the minute.

The Xero community event opening video

As my involvement in the event content deepened, I became interested in the event opening video, which, in 2019, our US-based team was tasked with creating for the conference. The marketing and creative team came up with the concept of spotlighting attendees at the conference, and pairing them with quirky stop-motion style visuals.

For the US event, I was able to assist in the role of video and motion editor on the project. The video was a huge hit, and was reshot with local talent and edited in a similar way for the remaining Australia and United Kingdom events later in the year. You can see the US and Australia videos below.