Workday
Rising 2025
Workday Rising is our largest, loudest, and most impactful moment of the year. Designed to bridge the gap between business strategy and user experience, this flagship event offers deep dives into our technology roadmap for thousands of attendees. It is the ultimate driver for business velocity, creating a direct line from attendee engagement to pipeline acceleration and expanded product adoption.
Workday Rising 2025 was our largest event yet, with nearly 20,000 attendees. Hosted at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, we closed down Howard Street, creating a true campus experience. This Rising was extra-special as it was Workday’s 20th birthday, and the first Rising after our rebrand.
The Look and Feel
The look and feel was inspired by the glow of a rising sun. Light bends, fun promotional treatments, and freeform gradients- inspired by the new Workday brand, defined this identity. This strong foundation allowed us to flex the brand in strategic moments. from the latest technology, to translucent materials, to 60’ illustrated murals.
Mara has built amazing relationships with both stakeholders and vendors. She's always able to quickly find a creative solution to any problem we face. But what stands out most to me, is her dedication and reliability. She is so on top of every detail, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks, and consistently goes above and beyond—often working outside of standard hours to meet deadlines or move projects along. Her ability to manage hundreds of simultaneous projects is truly impressive, and I'm SO lucky to have this kind of support in a coworker!
The Expos
For the fourth year, I partnered with Aly Cunningham to lead the Rising Expo(s). This year, for the first time, we had two expos (South Expo- housing Finance, HR, and Services Workday Zones, Customer Activations, Sponsors, and “The Core,” and West Expo- housing the IT Workday Zone and Sponsors).
Our color strategy for the expos connected each buying center/product to a marketing campaign. We were ensuring that across Workday, our messaging and branding were consistent- and we were using the same creative to hero people in our “Elevating Humans” campaign, as we were using the HR Zone of our Expo at Workday Rising.
“The West Expo was show-stopping in that the developer community typically feels overwhelmed at a place like Rising. I thought the transfer to their own space was perfect. The body language of the people in that room, they were taking their bags off, they were getting comfortable, they were leaning in to have a conversation. You could really see and feel that we knew our audience this year, so from an HR perspective, it was that clean, slick. easy to flow, comfortable, and then for the IT people, it was, like, safe and secure.”
- Senior Director of Product Marketing, Workday
Your vision and execution transformed the West Expo into a masterpiece of how our brand shows up in the world—elevated, inspiring, and unmistakably Workday. Express Labs didn’t just deliver learning; it became a north star for the event, a beacon of inspiration, and even an unplanned photo opp hotspot where attendees couldn’t help but capture the energy you created.
Pushing the Brand
With our brand reliant on emotive gradients, bold text, and hero treatments, we had to find elements and styles to complement that direction in highly narrative moments. This Workday Partners mural, and UX Timeline were some of my favorite pieces I worked on this year.
I illustrated the entirety of the 56’ mural wall, leaning into the sunrise feeling throughout the event, nodding to the city we were in, and telling the story of community through scenery.
