When it comes to tech, Kansas City punches above its weight class. In fact, KC has more tech workers per capita than Houston, Charlotte, Chicago, Nashville, and St. Louis, and ranks sixth in the nation in tech job growth in 2023. KC Tech Council serves as the voice for tech in Kansas City.

KC Tech Council is an independent, not-for-profit membership organization working with industry leaders to strengthen and promote Kansas City’s tech industry through policy advocacy, tech talent development, catalyzing industry knowledge, and driving visibility for the region’s innovation economy.

While KC Tech Council is a successful B2B brand — bringing both companies and talent to KC — it hasn’t yet become a symbol of the KC technology community. KC Tech Council needed a new simple system to govern corporate communication and that would become the symbol for the KC tech community at large.

The system is inspired by user interfaces, something all members interact with whether they are developers or not. This motif represented the brand perfectly since KC Tech Council serves as a sort of interfacing and way-finding tool for their members. The most basic component of a user interface and a way-finding system is the cursor and the arrow. The K in the wordmark is a combination of a cursor connecting with a pixel that creates a way-finding arrow.

The system is built around this symbology, making layouts simple yet striking. KC Tech Council promotes a lot of programming, often in person and with fees depending on membership status. To make communicating critical event information easy, the system employs a rounded rectangle modifier to highlight the key details of an event. This element supports the user interface inspiration as well.