When you’ve got a tradeshow coming up, planning for its design is essential. A great design should support your campaign theme and take your booth from so-so to stunning.
Impressive Images
- Now is the time to bring out your best imagery. Attendees may only spend 5 seconds looking at your booth before they decide to engage further or simply walk away.
- Provide visuals at all distances: Long-range can be viewed from across the tradeshow floor, mid-range can be viewed as attendees approach your display and finally short-range view for use inside your booth. When designing in short-range, the most important information should be located at eye-level.
- The use of vector graphics will ensure sharp, non-pixelized printing no matter what size you need to scale them to.
- Photographs in your display should be high resolution (300 dpi) at the size they will print to ensure they don’t appear pixelated.
- Large images may require multiple panels for set up, be aware of where seams will fall to ensure they land in a pleasing place, not for instance, in the middle of a face.
- Think beyond print alone, digital experiences, video and VR can all be used to stand out.
Clear Message
Keep your message clear and simple with wording that is legibly printed in an easy-to-read font. Your company’s purpose or offering should be easy for attendees to grasp. Try to keep your main graphic message to ten words or less.- Limit the number of fonts you use, one or two are all that you should need to keep your visuals inviting and uncluttered.
- Your booth should be tailored to your prospective client, not to everyone.
- Keep colors, fonts and images consistent with your brand. Unless your tradeshow goal is to showcase a redesign of your brand, inconsistency would most likely cause confusion.
- Embrace negative space even though you have a lot to say. You can have brochures on hand that go into further detail once you have engaged with an attendee. Too many words and images can be overwhelming in a visually heavy environment like trade shows.
Functional Flow
- Before approving a final design, view a mock-up showing where each panel, table, visual and any other components will be located to ensure your booth will function and flow the way you intended it to.
- If your booth is large enough to accommodate different zones for your attendees, check if there is enough room for walking around pieces of your display and that they are safely constructed so you’re not worrying about someone bumping into a display that could come toppling down.
Lighting can vary depending on where your booth is set up, including lights in your booth can add visual appeal as well as ensure your booth looks its best no matter where it is located.