A playful activation that gave DC's tallest landmark its smallest and most charming visitor.
A custom illustration and interactive game asset designed for Destination DC's client open house, bringing a beloved piece of DC's living culture into a tactile brand experience built for the room.
OVERVIEW
CREDITS
Poster Illustration & Sticker Design → Yasmine Bouchlaghem
Sr. Creative Direction → Alex Gnafakis
Project Management → Candyce Beatty
INDUSTRY
Tourism
SERVICES
Illustration
Print Event Poster Design
Sticker Design
STACK
Illustrator
Procreate
CLIENT
Destination DC
Destination DC needed an activation piece for their client open house that could hold its own in a professional event setting while still inviting people to genuinely engage with it. The brief wasn't a typical print deliverable. It called for an illustrated game asset that functioned as both a polished design object and a tactile interactive experience.
The concept had to feel native to DC, instantly readable, and magnetic enough to draw a crowd without relying on instructions to land.
THE CHALLENGE
THE STRATEGIC APPROACH
The marketing team arrived with a concept rooted in DC's living culture: the giant pandas currently resident at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have become one of the city's most talked-about tourism draws, and placing one on the Washington Monument was a premise with built-in delight. The design challenge was making the execution precise enough to earn it. An illustration that reads clearly at sticker scale, a dashed target outline that guides without over-directing, and a poster composition that turns the whole thing into a visual payoff the moment someone gets it right.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
The panda and the Washington Monument backdrop were first illustrated together in Procreate, a full composition showing the panda climbing the monument, used to present the interactive concept to the marketing team and validate the visual direction before production. The panda was given a deliberately clean, graphic quality: expressive enough to have personality, simple enough to scale without losing legibility. Once approved, both assets were vectorized in Illustrator to create print-ready files, the monument scene as a poster with a dashed silhouette target, and the panda as a die-cut velcro-backed sticker. The two were designed as a matched set, with the sticker precision-fitted to the outline so that getting it right feels genuinely satisfying.
THE OUTCOME
The activation needed no introduction and generated exactly what it was designed to: a room full of engaged clients, genuine competition, and a few very satisfied winners. It turned a professional setting into a genuinely competitive one, proof that the right creative concept, executed with care, can shift the entire atmosphere of a room.
Both assets performed exactly as designed, the sticker landing cleanly against its outline and the poster holding its visual weight across the room. A two-piece system that felt effortless to play with precisely because nothing about its construction was left to chance.
2 printed assets precision-engineered to function as one interactive system
Multiple rounds played, genuine competition, and happy winners at the open house
