Tamirlan Askar · Product Design Lead
beetech: building a tech-conference brand from zero, across three years
I built and evolved the brand for beetech, Beeline's tech conference in Kazakhstan, from zero into a distinct identity built on a "Kazakhstani Code" concept (код → кот, code → cat) and a cast of cat mascots. I directed a team that grew from 3 to 8 designers as the event passed 1,000 attendees and drew speakers from Booking, Nvidia, and Avito.
Impact
- 3,000+ total participants across the run
- 1,000+ attendees by 2024-25, from a zero-brand start
- 4.43 avg satisfaction · 90+ content sessions
- 3 → 8 designers scaled over 3 years
Context and challenge
beetech is Beeline's tech conference for the whole IT crowd (product, developers, designers, backend, ML, DevRel) and a brand play for Beeline itself. The DevRel director brought me in during its second year.
We started with zero brand foundation and no audience data. The conference aimed to become Kazakhstan's main technology event. That meant an identity that felt locally rooted without leaning on national-stereotype symbolism that could alienate international or non-Kazakh attendees, and one that could evolve year over year without losing recognition.
The concept: Kazakhstani Code
The brief tied the event to "Kazakhstani Code": code written in Kazakhstan that travels out, to Silicon Valley and beyond. I caught the wordplay that became the whole brand: код (code) sounds like кот (cat).
So "Kazakhstani Code" became a cast of cat mascots, playful and approachable, nothing like the usual serious corporate tech event. The cats dodged cultural cliché while keeping a real local connection.
Three-year evolution
The centerpiece is the same brand growing up year over year: one key-visual banner per year, so you can see the cats (and the whole identity) evolve.
Year 1 (2023): foundation · 3 designers. We established the cat-mascot concept and visual direction from scratch and launched the identity. When a teammate was unsure of the aesthetic, I drew live sketches to show the exact vision rather than describe it.
Year 2 (2024): evolution and expansion · 5 designers, art-directed remotely from China. We aged the mascots and moved to a more neon aesthetic, split them into three domains (Big Data, Management, Development), each with its own clothes and accessories, and built out the environmental design: neon ribbon installations, banners, venue navigation. The 2024 event drew 1,000 offline attendees and speakers from Booking, Nvidia, and Avito.
Year 3 (2025): transformation and rebrand · 8 total (5 internal + 3 external). The biggest shift: a rebrand to "beetech-by-QazCode" with a deconstructive graffiti direction. We kept but matured the cats (down to 2 core mascots), introduced a parrot character for QazCode, and mixed 3D-rendered cats with 2D illustration. The story: the parrot "vandalized" the conference with graffiti, broken gradients, and chaos, down to animated sequences of the parrot spray-painting "by QazCode" over the original logo, and hand-painted t-shirts made with a graffiti illustrator. The brand carried 130 talk applications, 2 streams (AI & Beyond / General), 20 talks, 3 workshops, speed mentoring with 10 mentors, and 1,000+ participants.
Leadership and process
Across the three years I ran the project week to week: team calls, prioritizing and distributing tasks, coordinating with the organizers and stakeholders. I gave direct creative guidance when it was needed (the live-sketch moment) and otherwise let the team shape the evolving brand. The real test was keeping the vision consistent while the team, the surfaces, and finally a full rebrand kept growing under it, across multiple companies and, for a year, across continents.
What I'd do differently
I'd codify the brand system and reusable templates earlier. The identity matured over three years; locking the templates down from year one would have sped up production and protected consistency from the first event, not the third, especially once the team grew and went remote.
