HMGE: Homecoming

Design the visual identity for an event built around a person — not a concept

Bydia Wilson was a Morehouse man from Philadelphia who came to New York to build something. He called it HMGE — a brand showroom for independent designers, a platform for creative culture, a vision he worked on relentlessly. He was a creative director, a fashion mind, a connector. He passed away in September 2023. HMGE: Homecoming was the event his community built to honor him — blending music, art, and the collective energy of everyone he brought together during his life. The design had to hold all of that. Not just look good. Actually hold it.

Design for grief and celebration simultaneously — and make them feel like the same thing

The hardest design briefs are the ones where the stakes are human. HMGE: Homecoming wasn’t selling tickets to a party. It was gathering people who loved Bydia Wilson and giving them a space and a visual language to do that in. Every design decision had to carry warmth without sentimentality, edge without coldness, and celebration without erasure of what the evening actually was.

We leaned into the language Bydia himself operated in — independent culture, community aesthetics, the visual vocabulary of people who build things from the ground up. Community flyers. Record culture. Independent print. The textures and line drawings that come from artists who make work because they have to, not because they were asked to. Nostalgic but not dated. Personal but not private.

The identity was built to feel like something his people would recognize immediately — that sense of “By would have been into this.” Bold type that doesn’t apologize for itself. Motion that has warmth in its rhythm. A visual system layered enough to feel rich without feeling overproduced, because the most honest tribute to someone who built things independently is work that carries that same integrity.

The social campaign was designed to pull people in slowly — teaser assets with subtle animation and intentional mystery, building toward the event without revealing everything at once. On-site, the brand extended through the physical environment: signage, projection, and staging that transformed the venue into something that felt like a homecoming in the truest sense of the word. Not a memorial that asks you to be sad. A celebration that asks you to remember.

An event that felt like the person it was honoring

The design gave the community a visual container for something that’s hard to contain. People showed up, the room felt right, and the work held the weight of the evening without announcing itself. That’s the only outcome that mattered — and it was the right one.