At Oxford Global, in-person events are the culmination of a marketing campaign over a year in length. I worked closely with the Operations team to ensure that all visual elements of the attendee experience (no matter how small, including those created by other teams) were passed through the Design Team, executed cleanly and on-brand.
For a typical event, over 50 unique designs and templates were created, with well over 100 different assets being printed.
Spotlight: ‘N-Frame’ Networking Arch
A ‘N-Frame’ Networking Arch is a complex construction with 8 faces. The strength of the meeting offerings were a serious USP of the events, so these were unique designs for each.
Difficulties of the format included:
- Each face required bleed, introducing a challenge for having elements pass over multiple faces. Those elements needed to line up exactly to the margin but overlap in the bleed.
- The front and back of the arch were the same, adding complexities completing a seamless loop for images that wrap around a whole ‘leg’. (As part of my handover, I created a annotated paper model to help the rest of the team wrap their heads around it – pun intended.)
Sign-off from senior staff is required before large-form designs go to print. To help them visualise this, I created an accurately measured frame in Adobe Dimension, and used Photoshop to create a mockup at multiple angles.
Other Notable Formats
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A5 Event Guide: Unfolded to A3
Provided to delegates at registration in their badges with the important info as the front/back when folded.
The quick reference map indicates which rooms are relevant to which parts of the programme – delegates would typically be interested in one or the other.
The reverse side is the Exhibition Floorplan (below).
Exhibition Floorplan
Used as reverse of unfolded Event Guide (above), as well as standing signage in the Exhibition Hall.
InDesign (Key and Layout): Automatic numbering set up between text frames in key. Careful use of links saw the same map pulled into different contexts/assets.
Illustrator (Map): I used a renumbering script to streamline removing/adding stands.
Agenda Poster
A typical conference had 10-18 tracks, each with its own poster on the conference room door, manually created by the Operations team. I condensed days of work into hours by switching to smarter workflows.
Visit the page on ‘Automations and Data-powered Design‘ to learn about the wide-reaching gains of the ‘On-Page Agenda’ project.
Large-scale Signage
(Click to enlarge and for more information)
Other Signage
(Click to enlarge and for more information)
To learn more about my time at Oxford Global, and the breadth of work involved, visit ‘Head of Design: 9 Years Leading a Function‘.