These banners were made for SirsiDynix’s annual release party. Each year the theme and design were totally up to me. They were printed off huge and all the developers that worked on those releases signed it. It was then hung up in the engineering lab. When I sent the 2013 design to the CTO for approval his emailed response was “*jaw drops*.”
This was my first attempt at Billboard artwork. Turns out, it’s hard to say everything you want to say when the font size needs to be legible from 50 feet. I created this design in Illustrator in 2013.
This was a surprisingly difficult project. I had created an ad campaign about librarians being super heroes and the Event Planner at SirsiDynix thought we should make a man and a woman Super Hero cardboard cut out for our tradeshow booth to match. She ordered super hero costumes and found several fit people to pose while wearing them. The trouble is, very few people are THAT fit. Also, we didn’t have professionally designed super hero costumes to work with. They were baggy in places they shouldn’t have been and too long or too short in the arms and the legs. On top of that, our camera was not really high enough quality to print an image so big. It was a hot, photoshop mess. In the end, I digitally painted / photoshopped these files to death. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, and I think our event planner was too. You can see the lady herself in the picture below, posing behind the cutout at one of our shows.
Tradeshow booth design can be a tricky beast. This project in particular, which included enormous banners hanging from 20-ft towers that light up, was a little bit intimidating. The scale is hard to conceptualize, and it’s hard to find quality inspiration without attending a lot of tradeshows in person. This was also one of those projects that tends to influence lots of projects in the future. A company’s booth becomes part of it’s identity. I specifically remember inspiration hitting me for this project in the wee hours of the morning. I hopped onto my computer and worked while my family slept all around me (I had a newborn). I chose the giant, illustrated swirls because we were desperately trying to communicate momentum and change. I chose to focus the banners on short questions that we’d like to answer for our customers, hoping to inspire those who saw it to come and ask more. After the big booth was finished we also did a series of pull-up banners for small shows, in multiple languages. The bottom pictures show several examples in the wild. I primarily used Illustrator in the creation of these banners.
