Designing Your Next Tradeshow Booth

By Tim Patterson

Time for a new booth? Ready to start from scratch – again?

Then it’s time to consider any and all designs for your booth. And keep an open mind about where you might end up. Because when it comes to designing and fabricating a new booth, there really is no path you have to follow.

The first thing to consider is your budget, because without a definite idea of how much you’re going to spend, there’s no getting to…

Step two: your choice!

Yes, step two can be virtually anything: booth size, concept, color, company brand, Most Important Message.

From there you move on to the floor plan. This is where you start laying out your various needs. Do you need a sampling area? Are you serving food? Will you need a plasma screen hooked up to your laptop? Do you need a secluded area so you can talk to clients? Do you need storage? If so, how much?

You’ll need to address all of these questions and more during your design process. This is where the services of a professional designer comes in, especially if your booth is going to be an island booth at least 20’ x 20’. At this size, you’ll want to be able to direct traffic flow to a certain degree. The larger your booth, the more you can plan how tradeshow traffic will enter and exit your booth – and the more control you’ll have over what visitors will see as they flow through your booth.

Even a booth as small as a ten-foot in-line booth will have some questions regarding traffic flow. For instance, do you want a table in front to display your products? Or are you more interested in a display that invites visitors to enter your space and spend time there?

While a table is convenient for displaying products, it has the negative aspect of blocking people off from entering your booth. An open space, on the other hand, communicates subtly that you want your prospects and clients to enter into your booth and spend a little more time.

Different tradeshows offer different challenges. Your goals will usually vary subtly from show to show.

The design phase of your booth is the most critical. Everything flows from your design: graphics, look and feel, fabrication, lighting. If you’re hiring a design and fabrication firm to do the whole project, expect the design phase to ideally take up several weeks. You should anticipate that the design phase will use up approximately 8 – 12% of your total booth budget, depending on how elaborate the design and how many times you go back to the drawing board for tweaks and adjustments.

The design phase should also include a general look and feel for the graphics – at least the areas of your booth that will be covered by graphics, and maybe even a color scheme that the graphics will follow.

Another significant part of your design is to look closely at the fabrication materials. While you may want to go towards some of the newer, more lightweight construction materials such as fabric, it’s important to ask if that look compliments or clashes with your company’s brand or image. If the company’s image is that of a rustic barn, for instance, it would be counter-productive to construct a glossy, shimmery fabric booth, even if you save thousands in construction and drayage costs. Chances are it would damage your image much more than you just saved!

Now that you’ve spent weeks and months perhaps designing and fabricating your new booth, once you do the first show with it you’ll always have another idea to improve. It’s like building a house. After you’ve lived in it awhile, even if it’s the coolest house in the world, you’ll find something small that you wished you could change. Remind yourself that it ain’t a perfect world, but you did the best you could covering all the bases! Even the greatest sports teams can only practice so long before they have to go out and play the game for real.

To recap: tradeshow booth design is a challenge – but a great challenge, and one that needs to be entered into with a great deal of thought and preparation. Get input from all departments of your company that will be affected by the design, from management to sales and marketing, on down to the folks who will be working the show. Work closely with your designer, determine your company’s exhibiting needs, and together you’ll come up with a design that, while it may not be perfect, it will certainly look great and meet all your exhibiting goals.

Contact us at Interpretive Exhibits, Inc. if you would like to find out more details: info@interpexhibits.com.

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