Yandex
Young Con Summer BOOST
Yandex runs one of Russia's biggest student tech festivals. The brief was to make it feel like something people actually want to attend, not just another conference with a free tote bag.
We built the whole concept around a single idea: your career is an RPG, and you are the main character. Yandex's products become buffs and artifacts. The festival becomes a level-up, not a networking obligation. The tagline: Your Summer BOOST.
Speaker profiles turned into character cards listing abilities and achievements instead of job titles. The venue was mapped out like a game world — a machine learning dojo, an AI product lab, a zone where mentor NPCs reviewed your resume. Merch was treated as a guild trophy: something you earn by showing up, not something handed to you at the door.
8,000 people came in person. 30,000 watched online.