Case study · KNGRU Event Studio
A tool that turns the brand system into software
KANGARU's event posters were designed as a flexible system, but every asset was still made by hand. Event Studio encodes the system into an internal tool: blank canvas to a finished, on-brand poster in under a minute.
Context
Fifteen events a year, zero sponsors, ten-minute tasks
KANGARU runs 15+ events a year across Sydney and Melbourne, entirely volunteer-led. Every event needs a family of graphics: an Instagram post and story, a LinkedIn banner, venue screens, slides. I had designed the speaker card system to flex across guests and venues, but each asset was still assembled by hand in Figma, by me.
The community has an operating rule: no task should take a volunteer more than ten minutes. Poster production was breaking it, and I was the bottleneck.
The fix wasn't more templates. It was encoding the design system into software, inspired by Y Combinator's Startup School poster tool and Paper.design's image dithering.
The product
Guardrails, not a blank canvas
Event Studio is a real canvas editor (drag with snap guides, layers, per-platform safe areas, undo history, autosave) but every control is bounded by the brand:
- Seven formats, one language. Portrait poster, Instagram post and story, square, LinkedIn, slide and banner share a single layout engine, with three variants each and a randomize button.
- Content drives the design. The "event has a speaker" toggle reshapes the whole poster: with a speaker it offers Fireside Chat, Founder Stories or KANGARU Talk; without one it locks to the Roundtables format.
- Photos land on-brand. Uploads convert to black and white automatically, matching the speaker card system, with intensity and crop controls.
- Typography stays in the system. Two brand weights, brand colour stops, grain and safe areas by default; a volunteer cannot accidentally leave the brand.
The dither pipeline
The brand's pixel texture, from any photo
The pixelated kangaroo texture is the most recognisable part of the KANGARU identity, and the hardest to reproduce by hand. Event Studio ships a real-time dither converter: drop in any image and it quantises it into the brand's purple and green through seven algorithms, from Bayer matrices to Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion.
The same pipeline feeds poster backgrounds, so a venue photo or a speaker portrait can become an on-brand backdrop in one step.
The output
Still or moving, always seamless
Exports cover the whole publishing workflow: PNG, JPEG and PDF at multiple resolutions at once, plus animated MP4, WebM and GIF. The background animations (mesh drift, light sweep, moving grain) are phase-locked, so every exported video loops seamlessly on Instagram.
Because the exporter renders the document independently of screen zoom, the same poster ships pixel-perfect at every size, from a 3× print asset to a story loop.
Results
The designer is no longer the bottleneck
Designed and built solo with AI-assisted coding: Next.js, react-konva and a typed dither pipeline, shipped as an internal tool for the KANGARU community.