Large scale booth graphics for an annual aerospace trade show
APEX Trade Show
I designed the exterior booth graphics for APEX (Airline Passenger Experience Association), which is an annual trade show held in Southern California. Airline CEOs, executives and decision makers share insight and meet with exhibitors to demonstrate the latest innovations and technology in the aviation industry, specifically the future of the end-to-end passenger experience.
Overview
Team credits: Katherine K. - Design Manager, Tina K. - Graphic Designer (interior graphics)
Role
Art direction
Graphic design
Print production
Liaison with vendor &
contract designer
Document creation
Tasks
Booth graphics creation
Print preparation
Production & graphics delivery Coordination with stakeholders
Tools
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe InDesign
Company
Safran Passenger Innovations
Coordination
To start, I met onsite with the booth vendor to review the plan specifications and diagrams of the booth space to help myself and team prepare for the booth graphics concept and eventual deliverables.
I then began the organization process of creating a file like this, to track the exact amount of graphics needed Both interior and exterior), their status, their specs, their location within our booth space and any other pertinent details, to keep my team, executives and booth vendor all in sync.
Design
In the design phase, I took the best solution from the ideate phase and began exploring a look and feel for the final graphics so they feel like a cohesive, unified concept. As these are large-scale graphics, I created them in vector format (in Illustrator), as this is beneficial for high-quality graphics that can easily scale up or down, without compromising the quality of the final deliverables.
Once the design direction was finalized, I communicated weekly with the contract designer to produce the interior graphics, while I created all of the exterior graphics.
Mood board
It was during this trade show that the company would unveil the latest 3rd generation inflight entertainment (IFE) embedded seat back product to visitors. This is the product that my team and I had been designing for the past year.
My team and I were exceedingly excited to be able to witness people’s reactions to interacting with the new product and knew the importance of having a strong presence at the trade show to gain as many visitors to our booth as possible!
The created this mood board as a launching point to explore a fresh, modern tech look and feel. I looked into bold, impactful typefaces, patterns and styles that conveyed movement and added texture and intrigue. I also explored various dark color schemes to contrast with the typical light styles we’ve done in the past. Additionally, I wanted to incorporate warm, bright colors into the palette, since blue was a traditional, “safe” color, heavily used by our company in the past.
Final booth graphics
Various exterior and interior angles of the booth are showcased below. Named after our company’s IFE product line, RAVE (stands for Reliable, Affordable, Very Easy), our company’s mascot, Mr. RAVE, is proudly displayed at the entrance of the booth, “breaking through” the literal corporate box around him, with confidence and pride.
As this particular trade show is consistently held in Southern California, we also chose to tie-in a palm tree motif. The interior graphics also incorporated some of the wavy, organic shapes and movement depicted on the exterior, for a cohesive feel.
Supporting artifacts
In addition to the creation of the graphics, preparing them for print, coordination effort between myself with the vendor and with the contract designer for the interior graphics, there were additional artifacts I put together to support the show.
Attendee screens
The trade show consisted of two days and at the end of each day, I received various photos from my manager, attending the event. I designed imagery for the purpose of being displayed on our company’s internal TV displays for employees to view who were not able to attend the event. These screens highlighted some of the big moments from the weekend.
Booth graphics documentation
To serve as a reference of the final design concept, I created a document with the graphics superimposed into the vendor’s booth schematics.
There’s more to discover!
Airline branding for inflight entertainment products
GUI • Branding • Documentation