Best Practices for Trade Show Booth and Exhibit Graphic Design

How to effectively integrate your marketing campaign assets into a trade show display

The scenario: your company unveils a fresh marketing strategy complete with ads, ad copy and branding materials. As the in-house Trade Show Guru, you are tasked to incorporate these new "traditional" graphics, logos and assets into your trade show exhibit design.

Grabbing the incredibly short attention of trade show attendees is a unique challenge. You have only a few seconds to make the visual and emotional impact needed to encourage an interaction with your booth. How can you most effectively apply your traditional marketing into the event space?

There are a few basic graphics guidelines that will help make the most impact On The Show Floor:

1. Simple Signage: if it takes attendees more than 5 seconds to read your graphic, attendees will not read it. Keep the text short, impactful and to the point.
2. Eye Level, Not Floor Level: keep important graphics or information at least 20" off the floor or risk it going unnoticed.
3. Left to Right, Top to Bottom: people take in trade show graphics like they do newspapers so make sure your messaging is arranged in this way.
4. Choose Fonts Wisely: fonts are your marketing voices that can whisper or scream your message. Choose typeface that matches the emotional tenor of your brand and campaigns.
5. Colour Consistency: be stable with brand colours through multiple touch points to avoid visual overload and to help maintain your theme.

Properly Preparing Show Ready Graphics for your Display House

The scenario: your graphics team hands over assets for the new campaign. How do you prepare these assets to be "show ready" so your Display House can integrate them into your display design?

Tips for turning traditional media into trade show ready graphics:

• Provide native graphic files (photoshop, illustrator, etc.) and current brand standards.
• Use large format graphics that are designed to scale. Vector based graphics ideal for such scaling.
• Keep your messaging relevant, clear and concise.
• Keep in mind how the exhibit is constructed. Large graphics and messaging can get lost if you have them in the wrong place. You want to take note of panel breaks, monitor placement and other structural elements that tend to break up the graphics.
• If you are using images for your marketing ads be sure to use the highest quality photos possible. You can always shrink a photo but it can be difficult to enlarge one while retaining its quality and impact.

If any part of this is confusing Ideograph can help. The full-service design department will work with you to quickly eliminate many pain points associated with converting traditional ads into large format graphics. We want to make sure your exhibit graphics are bold and creative, really standing out from the competition with sharp designs and attention-grabbing colours.