World Gymnaestrada comes around every four years. Twenty thousand gymnasts, dancers and circus performers, ages 1 to 100, fill a host city for a week and perform for each other instead of against each other. In 2031 that city is Las Vegas, the first edition ever held in the Americas.

James Helms, a friend from my Intuit days, introduced me to Lori Laznovsky at USA Gymnastics on August 4. Her brief fit in one email: a mark that feels elevated and a little moody, something new because event logos “tend to start to look alike,” ready inside two months so the international federation would have time to approve it.

The kickoff was one call with Lori and Rosa Poetschke, who handles marketing and communications for the host team. I turned it into eight takeaways and a set of dials to judge every mark against, so by the time the first concepts showed up we already agreed on what good looked like.

I keep a client’s work in a single Google Slides deck with the newest round on top, so the whole history is one scroll away. Rosa sent her notes back as recorded videos, twelve generous minutes of them after Round 1, and each new round started with a slide that played those notes back before showing anything new.

Rosa picked two on September 4. What sold the trio was its reverse: she said seeing a mark reversed before you ever need it is what saves the “uh-oh” moment later. From that round on, nothing appeared in positive without its reverse beside it, and both finalists went onto the first thing the mark has to do, the printed credential.

Figures step forward together, heads in gold, cerise and turquoise, and their bodies are the beams of a stage light meeting on one floor. Read it one way and it’s a group taking a bow with hands raised. Read it the other way and it’s the light finding them. Both readings are the event.

Fourteen lockups, stacked, landscape, wide and medallion, dated and undated, each one shown beside its reverse so nobody meets the reversed version for the first time on a dark banner.

Rosa asked for “the whole world, all the different colors” in the palette, so it runs yellow and orange through pink and purple into the blues. Gold, cerise and turquoise lead, and the greens that came and went from the mark stayed on in the palette for wayfinding and credential roles.

Darker Grotesque does everything, and it’s open source, so no licensing bill waits at the end, which Rosa was glad to hear. The curled leg on the R gives the wordmark a little play. Capitals belong to the lockup and the partner row, and everything else is set in sentence case.

The beams are the pattern: stage lights rising from the ground line, swaying and walking front to back through one another. They carry the hero of the guide, the monorail wrap and every section break, and they run in plain CSS, so there’s no video to download.

The mark switches on the way it does at the top of this page. The beams draw up from the floor, drift, flash white like a car’s high beams and land in color. I directed it with voice memos and screen recordings, one timing note at a time, until the landing read as fanfare.

The week runs across the city, from the convention center to MGM Grand Garden Arena to a stage on Fremont Street, so the system has to read as one family from a light pole on the Strip to a pin traded in Lisbon.

Once the trio was picked, I built the brand guide as a long scroll on ldlr.design, cinematic enough to feel like the event and practical enough to hand to a vendor on day one. Every lockup comes as SVG and PNG, the palette as swatches, CSS and design tokens with Pantone references, and the usage rules follow the kit Lisbon 2027 sends to national federations.

USA Gymnastics picked the trio on September 13, and Lori sent it to World Gymnastics for approval two days later. Its first public stage is Lisbon in July 2027, on the shirts, jackets and pins the US delegation will trade with the world, four years before twenty thousand performers walk into Las Vegas under it.