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EVENT DESIGN
 Our annual conference for partners and distributors has always been about substance, not style. We have great content, but have never invested much time or resources in the event’s aesthetics. This year, we are considering hiring a design firm to take things to the next level visually. That said, we don’t want to go overboard by adding a lot of glitzy elements that look good but don’t serve a purpose — particularly when budgets for all of us are tight. We want to be sure that whatever we’re adding supports our business objectives for the event in some way. What advice to you have to help us make our first event-design experience as smooth and as successful as possible?
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BRIEFING ROOM
Quite simply, the way your event looks says something about who you are as a company. While smoke and fancy stage sets probably aren’t appropriate for your event, design is always important, regardless of the event or audience. If you use a marker to write session room titles on cheap paper and tape those sheets to the room doors, it sends a message. If your graphics and all of the other visuals on display at your event are consistent, professional, and aligned with your brand, however, that sends another message altogether.
You’re right to be watching budget carefully, particularly in today’s economy. But the lesson here is that you don’t always have to spend a lot of money to improve an event’s appeal. At the very least, even if your budget is tight, you always want to make sure every event visual enhances your messaging rather than detracts from it.
To achieve your goals efficiently and effectively, begin the event-design process by preparing an agency brief or creative brief for your designer before your first design meeting. In your brief, include an overview of why you are holding the event, a description of the audience that will attend your event, details about your desired outcomes, and a list of pre-, at-, and post-event communications channels and tactics, if those tactics have been determined. If you are working with a new design partner, also include information about your company’s brand guidelines.
Note that while this document gives a thorough overview of your event’s objectives and goals, it does not communicate what you want your event to look like. It’s your designer’s job to bring you concepts that align with your objectives, and help you achieve them.
When you meet with your design team, invite any internal stakeholders who have full and final authority to sign off on design concepts. If, as the event manager, you do not have final approval, it is critical to involve your vice president or CMO in the concept presentations. Very often, event managers approve a plan, and give designers the green light. Then, shortly before the event, the CMO turns his or her attention to the event strategy, and requests a gazillion changes. This, of course, sends costs skyrocketing, and adds a tremendous amount of stress for the event manager and design team. So loop your management in on your agency brief, and invite them to the concept presentation. The result: a design that works, and satisfied teams.
 John Cassese,
principal and founding partner,
Concentric Communications,
New York
VISUAL LEARNING
Your event’s design will absolutely make a difference in its success. Visuals are so important to setting an event’s tone. Sure, you can choose a nondescript conference room with standard-issue hotel or convention-center accents. However, you can take that same space and brighten it with color, imagery, and some attention to lighting. You’ll be surprised how much difference these small touches can make.
But at my former company, Radius, we didn’t stop with tone. We viewed the event’s design as a kind of implicit, strategic learning component.
Radius held an annual global meeting for its shareholders and partner agencies, and the look and feel of the event was a major consideration during our planning process. We viewed the annual shareholder meeting as our once-a-year opportunity to close out the previous year and launch the next one by introducing our annual corporate objectives, and previewing the communications that would support them, such as our new ad campaigns.
But as a global organization with representation in more than 80 countries, our partner agencies played a key role in putting our brand into the marketplace in a consistent and professional manner. So we were very careful to design all of the visual elements of the event in ways that reinforce the importance of our visual brand. For example, by creating a consistent look and feel throughout the event, and by ensuring that every set, graphic, video, and screen incorporated the same look and theme, we were able to communicate a consistent brand message. The focus that we placed on that consistency helped our partners to see and understand our key messages in retain them for the coming year.
Like any visual experience, describing how to present a visual brand is not nearly as effective a teaching tool as showing how to present it. By ensuring your design does double duty, both as ambience and as a strategic storytelling or learning component, you get twice the bang for your designer bucks.
 Maria Udy,
formerly vice president, global
marketing, Radius: The Global
Travel Co., Bethesda, MD
BRAND FROM THE OUTSIDE
Good design is purposeful — not wasteful. When all of your design elements support a strategic messaging or business objective, nothing is superfluous, and nothing is wasted.
To design a branded environment for your event that resonates fully with your attendees, the best advice is to think less about how your brand looks, and more about how you want your customers to react to the brand. In other words, your brand isn’t “blue.” It “communicates assurance and stability.” Then think very, very carefully about what it will take, from a design perspective, to elicit that reaction.
The successful solution is rarely the first or easiest one that comes to mind. For example, we recently collaborated with The Donahue Group on a project for a new high-end retailer located in Scottsdale, AZ. They wanted to build brand awareness among the fashion elite with a promotional installation at New York’s Fashion Week event. The client’s original design brief asked that we create an environment that conveyed two things: the company’s distinct brand identity and a uniquely Arizona feel. Instead of rushing off to design just that, we took a step back to explore ways in which we could better define the program and connect with the audience.
At the time, the target audience had very little awareness of the client’s brand. So rather than focus on the under-recognized brand and the Arizona landscape, we suggested that the design focus on the high-fashion experience. Fashion Week attendees respond to exclusivity, style, and excellence — qualities that underscore the concept of premium fashion. To visually illustrate those qualities and tether them to the brand, we designed an environment that created a subtle yet rich brand experience that communicated style and taste — something the audience could immediately connect with. We created a connection between fashion and the desert through video, overlapping imagery of various opacities, and a few select natural elements, like succulents, all integrated in the space.
So think about the key takeaways you want your attendees to learn at the event, and the emotions you want to elicit that will help them retain that information. Then challenge your designers to go beyond the obvious and create a solution that isn’t glitzy just to get noticed, but rather carefully curated to envelop your attendees in an effective, dimensional, and additive brand experience.
Also, look beyond signage and basic staging to create an effective brand environment that attendees will recall long after the event is over. You can engage surfaces such as walls, floors, and furniture with lighting and texture to infuse more support for your key messages, and to bolster the event’s overall effectiveness.
 Armen Gharabegian,
CEO and design director,
Ethos Design, Los Angeles
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