When our company was bought out and merged with Valiantys, I was brought onto a fitting project to ensure we had a great showing at Atlassian’s Team23 event. (Also again at Team24). The trade show company had a somewhat rudimentary process and it took some time to figure out exactly what our space was going to be. It was that factor that perked up my senses. Because anytime something is vague in terms of expectations, I immediately go into gear so my stakeholders don’t have the same problem I have.
We had many printable areas within the standard booth construction where we would fill with our own brand messaging. And I could see straight away from a planning point-of-view that we would benefit from a 3D simulated environment of the booth. This way our design decisions and approvals could be that much more thoughtful and precise. So I constructed a 3D replica of the booth near to scale, drew the various accessories and started skinning it with some initial artwork we had in our early discussions.
In doing this, multiple designers on the team, including myself, could provide 2D revisions of booth wall artwork and I could drop the elements into the 3D model as replacement textures and re-render the booth as images or an animation walkthrough. This helped us consider the different directions the event attendees would be traversing and how they would encounter the booth and what messaging we could use on every side. And in turn the feedback loops with stakeholders across the entire company were faster and easily translated into revisions
The most rewarding thing about my work is when a process I invent becomes the standard moving forward. So when the following year came around and we started talking about the trade show again, something said early on was “Mike, can you make the booth in 3D again?” Requests can be compliments and they don’t even know it.
Another project was constructing some looping video content for the screens in the booth. Below is an example of that motion graphic work that including some historical markers in the company and the company looking forward.
