When Forvis Mazars welcomes its newest partners, the experience needs to feel elite. I was the sole designer tasked with taking a rough concept—"What if we had talking avatars?"—and turning it into a high-end, flight-themed multimedia suite.
From voice-cloning the program’s "Captains" to building an AR poster system, I bypassed expensive external agencies to deliver a custom, in-house tech solution that blew the doors off the traditional welcome packet.
The Highlights
The Audience: Newly elected and direct-admit Partners (the firm’s highest level).
The Innovation: I built a custom AR pipeline from scratch, self-teaching the workflow to save the firm roughly $6,500 in software costs alone.
The Deliverables: Interactive welcome guides, a "Bento Box" style participant directory, and 6 daily AR poster experiences.
The Strategy: From "Talking Heads" to Immersive Tech
The challenge was twofold: the material was complex, and the participants (busy partners) were notoriously hard to engage. I used a "Flight" theme to tie everything together and make the onboarding feel like a journey rather than a chore.
The AR Posters: I took standard conference posters and turned them into interactive "Captain" briefings. Using AI voice cloning (trained on Zoom audio) and Zapworks, I created a seamless "scan and watch" experience.
The Bento Box Directory: To solve the "data dump" problem of 48 different partner bios, I used Bento Box design principles. This turned a wall of text into a clean, interactive "click-to-reveal" grid that looked as good as it functioned.
Interactive Welcome Guide featuring cohesive flight-themed design within Forvis Mazars brand guidelines
Bento Box-inspired Participant Directory using click-to-reveal design to present 48 partners' information in a uniform, navigable format
AR-enabled conference poster featuring voice-cloned captain avatar - participants scanned QR codes to experience interactive welcome messages
AR-enabled conference poster featuring voice-cloned captain avatar - participants scanned QR codes to experience interactive welcome messages. This design system was successfully adapted across five additional posters and AR experiences
The Tech Stack (The "How I Did It")
I didn't have a massive budget or a dev team, so I hacked together a professional-grade pipeline:
The Voice: Used 11Labs to clone voices from old Zoom calls.
The Animation: Processed images through Apple Playgrounds and DreamFace to animate the avatars.
The Delivery: Integrated everything into Zapworks for an auto-launching QR code experience that required zero app downloads for the users.
The Payoff
Partner-Level Impact: Delivered a "wow factor" for the firm's top leadership, proving that we can innovate in-house without external agency price tags.
UX Win: The interactive directory solved a long-standing data-collection headache, making it easy for partners to actually connect with one another.
Future-Proofed: The success of the AR posters has already sparked interest from other departments looking to modernize their static materials.
The Real Takeaway
This project proved that technical curiosity is a design superpower. By being willing to experiment with voice cloning and AR workflows, I was able to deliver a multi-thousand-dollar experience on a project that started as a simple request for "something interactive."
