Design, Art & Copy
The best booth experiences and interactives can be sabotaged by poor design and onsite communications. Here are some trade show booth design tips to make your booth design as professional as the rest of your experience.
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Let ter spacing.
Use clear typography on your banners. Make sure your banners have good legibility from close and far distances. Some fonts have loose kerning pairs, or odd spaces between letterforms that can be difficult to read. Close those gaps with kerning. 120 point font is a good starting point for trade shows.
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What meets the eye.
Keep your artwork, communication elements and your product at or near eye level. Text or objects that are down by the viewer’s knees are not visible. Keep in mind larger branding elements should be visible from a distance with people standing in front of your booth. If they have to squint or bend down you are not going to be able to communicate to them.
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Hang your banner high.
Think of your signage as billboards. Keep It Simple and legible from a distance. Include brand elements like your logo, catch phrases, a large-format product image. Use printed banner with dowels or grommets for hanging. Consider dye sublimation printed fabric mounted to a display rack. These offer easy setup for person, are collapsible and reusable.
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Focus on photos.
Consider the art direction of your booth photography. What mood do they convey? Stock photos are tempting to use because of their price but often they come across to attendees as “stocky”. Make sure the subjects and scenarios in your photos feel genuine. Use your own photos.
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Be indifferent.
Differentiate your booth design. If your competitors are all green, be the blue company.
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Booth wallpaper.
Invest is a professional backdrop. Use only vinyl banners if your event is outdoors for weather durability. Otherwise consider dye sublimation printed fabric backdrops.
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Stopping Power.
Think about viewing a billboard in a car. You have just 3-4 seconds to grab a passerby with your display. You want to reel them in and communicate immediately who you are and what you can do to benefit attendee’s lives.
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Be color bright.
Be bright and bold. Bright colors attract attention. Use bright decorative items that fit your brand. Design a bright attention getting poster that is 11 x 17. A pull up banner. Or an 8.5 x 11” tabletop poster in an acrylic case. Consider a splash of color behind an area you want to highlight. Bright colors can be achieved with printing companies by specifying Pantone Matching System (PMS) colors. These colors are more vivid, unlike conventionally produced Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (CMYK) counterparts. Often brand specific colors are specified using Pantone color books
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Creative for strategy’s sake.
Use creative messaging. Feature a headline paired with an illustration concept to create a “ah-ha” moment. Allow attendees to use their intelligence to figure out what you are saying with your concept to create a spark in their head.
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What type of brand are you?
Use appropriate fonts. Everyone knows not to use Comic Sans and Times New Roman is old fashioned and over used. Choose appropriate and differentiating fonts for the words you are choosing.
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Do you have the chops?
Do you have the design chops to make your business look professional? If not work with a professional graphic designer to coordinate your brand, colors, typography and photos to make all of your visuals work together in harmony. You don’t want your booth to not be taken seriously because it’s lacking design aesthetic.
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100 Ways to Make Your Trade Show booth the Show’s Main Attraction
Environmental Design
Making Your Booth a Destination
Experiential Intelligence
Interactivity
Engineering the Experience
Pre and Post Show Decisions
Design, Art & Copy
Next…Operations
Mastering the Intangibles
I look forward to helping you grow your business with graphic design and branding best practices. Signup for branding and design email updates and I’ll drop you a line when I update my blog.
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