At one of the first conferences I ever helped put together, we did something not seen in most conferences of this nature… I created a virtual host, a digital puppet as it were. On the big screens, this little fella was a virtual MC that did most of the announcements, introductions, and segues into other portions of the event:

…on the back end, I had a library and menu that I used to control him in case the conference went off-schedule. He was also built flexible enough so that I could reprogram and animate him (which actually happened) on the fly. Keep in mind, this character had a voice (my own, digitally modified), so some of the emergency tracks were recorded in my room at the conference hotel, then fitted into the animation modules I’d built for the character. It was way more work than I ever expected, but the audience was really responsive… and most importantly not bored. It’s hard enough to get people to go from morning to night non-stop, but I think this added an element a lot of people had never witnessed (including myself).

Statistically, most experiments fail… but when they win it more than makes up for it.

Illustrator, Flash, Swift 3D, and a lot of audio programs to change my voice… I’ll upload one of the movies later on (and try to provide some context).

Some designers are split when it comes to web-based graphics and print media, but I personally enjoy working within the limitations and possibilities with both mediums. When it comes to print, I really like doing the bigger stuff… there are few things that are more gratifying than seeing an image you’ve stared at on your monitor forever become something big, shiny, and real.
The key is planning everything out, and plans can be as different as the design itself.

Currently I produce one to three table top displays for national, regional, and statewide conferences, which are very similar to trade shows (with booths, networking, etc).
When I work in larger dimensions, I try to fill as much space as possible without losing the message inside a barrage of imagery… as with any design project, the artwork should push the message and make it easier for the viewer to digest.

Here are a few sample pieces, detail shots, and descriptions:

This is a four-panel work-in-progress shot (right, center, left, and center banner) that went to print about a year ago (as of this writing). Most of the art on the site panels was created  in Illustrator, but everything was composed in PhotoShop (at scale, 300dpi). The general height (not including the center banner) is 22 inches, printed on foam board with a gloss finish, and velcro’d onto a four-panel fold up backboard (the center piece takes up two panels). Once velcro has been attached to the back of each panel beforehand, set up and breakdown of this display literally takes less than three minutes:

One thing to keep in mind is that during trade shows or events like the ones these displays are used for, people are constantly moving. The goal is to create something striking, and not be dependent on handing out free trinkets with your name on them (pens, mousepads, etc). Remember that like billboards, too much text will make people look the other way… with displays, people will read bullets, but rarely paragraphs. Displays should be outlines, and usually the table top should have supplementary material (pamphlets, even photocopied documents) that expand on the points made visually.

The “Battered, Unbroken, Ascending” display below is my favorite for two reasons, the first being that it was the most personally-charged, and secondly because I was allowed full control over the visual assets. This display was shown at an education related conference soon after hurricanes Katrina and Rita… for those of us here in the state, the storms are scorched into our minds forever… but for a lot of people outside of the gulf south, what happened really is still sort of an abstract tragedy.

This was printed on one sheet of polystyrene (22″ h, 90″ w) and composed in PhotoShop at 300 dpi. The PSD file for this was done at scale, and weighed in at over 8 gigs in size. Every time I nudged something, it took my old machine between five and 10 minutes to render the new image. File size strain is one of the biggest problem for large format printing with raster files, but it’s all about the end goal:

Here’s a detail on the left and right sides of the display… of note, the different pieces of paper on the left were regular household items that I ripped apart and scanned in at roughly 1,200 dpi, then artificially weathered and distressed in PhotoShop. The paper pieces were scanned in at such a high resolution because they needed to appear large on the display… had I scanned them in at 300 dpi, they would have been printed at their real-life actual size (tiny scraps). The paper products used (from top to bottom) were a paper bag, a sheet from a steno note book, a chunk of cardboard, and envelope, some corrugated cardboard, and a paper towel:

The same display in use:

…the logo on the table skirt is a design I developed nearly seven years ago, in this case the table-skirt vendor simply needed a vector file (.eps).

One last display, simply because the ones presented so far are basically the same, they both attach to a paneled backboard (though with the long one-piece polystyrene print, the four panels become one curved surface).
On this project (San Francisco, 2006), I opted out of using the altogether. I had a basic idea in my head… I wanted to create something that the panels would hang from instead of being stuck on to.
I went to Lowe’s, and initially built a framework with PVC pipes (right there in the isle), but the weak plastic caused instability, and I knew there would be no way to use them to support any weight whatsoever. Luckily, Lowe’s had steel pipes, elbows, T-shapes, and bases. So again, right in the isle, I constructed a booth-like frame that looked just like the one I’d made with PVC, but this time it was incredibly stable. I bought spares of the smaller pieces, and even came up with alternative ways of putting the frame together (in case we were put in a corner or in the middle of the room):

…I was really excited about the way this one came out. The graphics (aside from some photos) were all vector, and the little airplane flying up in the center panel was a 3D model created in Animation: Master, exported as a .3Ds file, imported into Swift 3D and then rendered as a vector image. One of the funniest things about this display is that people were approaching me, asking me where I’d bought the blue “feet” for the display. All they really are were some little one-dollar garbage cans that happened to be shaded pretty similarly to the table skirt!

Here’s one last shot with a detail of the steel on top:

Each of the panels had two holes poked in at the top, and were literally strung up around the pipe with steel wire I’d bought at a craft store. Although this display was very successful at drawing in people, I probably won’t do another one like this for an out-of-state conference because dealing with over 100 pounds of pipes is a real drag (when you consider that you’re also packing other work materials, personal luggage, and the fact that you have to get it all back home, too).

One very important note:
Although I do the layouts, designs, and concepts for projects like this, I don’t do the actual printing. I have a friend at the main Kinko’s in Baton Rouge (on Airline Highway) named Gia… we’ve been working together for over six years, and she’s awesome. She treats print like a craft, and she’s a great designer and artist as well. Glad to have her as a friend and frequent working partner. Whenever you any large print jobs on this site, my friend Gia’s the one who made it go from digital to tangible. She understands the art of printing, even when it’s production stuff.

The assignment: Create a cover page for a program pamphlet.
The limitations: The cover should be done in black and white, as the pamphlet may be photocopied multiple times as well as sent over the fax machine.
What I don’t want to do: Make a boring cover, use clip art, or miss a chance to make something fun.

Solution:
1. Ask a student worker at the office to pose his arm and hand in a few different positions and start taking photos.
2. Grab a white sheet of copier paper and another sheet of paper with a lot of contrast. Take a photo.
3. Bring both pics into PhotoShop. Knock out a hole in the paper rippage, desaturate both photos them so they become greyscale, then increase the contrast a lot.
4. Clean up the images, trim away the edges, and cut the student’s worker’s shoulder and upper arm into two pieces (so part of him is inside the hole, and part of him pokes out).
5. Draw a thing that fits the layout in Illustrator, then import it into Photoshop and chip away parts of it (where the thumb is located).
6. Throw some words behind it, drop it in Word, and you’ve avoided all of MS-W’s limitations.

From concise to loose approximations, I think I make at least one Louisiana map a month. I try to give each one its own flavor. The line art is vector (Illustrator), the fills, shading, and composition are done in PhotoShop:

The assignment: create an image showing some particular logos together for a PowerPoint slide.

The only logo that I created here was the Regents seal in the very center… the other two circular seals to the left and right were delivered to me as .jpeg files, so they had to be cut out (they were in white boxes, as it were). I added the border around the LCTCS banner for contrast.
For the logos and seals on top (as opposed to the reflections), I stick with the “Perspective” tool under Image>Adjust>Free Transform.
After tweaking everything, I created the blue tabletop by using the polygon “straight-line” lasso and filling it with the cyan you see above.
I grouped the logos together, duplicated that group, flipped them upside down, and used the Distort and Perspective tools under Free Transform.
For PowerPoint, I typically export at 1024 x 768, as a PNG-24 with transparency (the version of this image used in the presentation is actually see-through in the upper white areas). PowerPoint does a surprisingly good job of supporting PNG files with varying levels of transparency (even transparencies that go from 100% to 0% opacity).