Trade Show Booths #3: Information and Product Display – What To Do, What Not to Do
Every person who has to set up an exhibit booth needs to spend some time walking through their local Walgreens or Wal-Mart with a digital camera. Both Walgreens and Wal-Mart spend millions of dollars each year on systematically designing booth displays for maximum appeal. There are some very important tricks they use, which can help you get the most out of your exhibit space.
First, you need to be aware that you are in an information dense environment. People walking the exhibit floor are bombarded with images, displays, signs, and people leaning out to hand them flyers, or get them to go through a product demos. At some shows, where audio video displays are allowed, booths can turn into “range wars” as people pump up the volume, trying to make sure that the only sound heard in their booth is their sound system. (This of course spills into the space of adjacent booths, and causes them to raise their volumes to do the same thing.)
So, you have potential customers bombarded from all sides, and you need to attract attention without alienating your neighbors, the exhibit all services and your customers. Here are some tips for you:
When setting up your displays, think of the nativity scene or at a Christmas pageant. You want to have all of the “lines” of your booth guide the eye to the display. The display should have large lettering at the top to be readable from a distance, and smaller type underneath. When choosing colors, use bright, primary colors to grab the eye, focusing on red and yellow.
If you’re presenting text for reading at a distance, the magic words are legibility and contrast. Legibility is how quickly a block of text can be read (readability is how much eyestrain is caused by reading long passages of that text.) Contrast is how rapidly the eye grabs the pattern of shapes and colors to be red. When optimizing for contrast, the first rule is that light text on a colored or dark background is noticed and read before anything else. The color patterns that have the best visual contrast for reading are yellow on dark blue, yellow on black and black on yellow. Avoid doing black on white – at convention hall reading distances, with all the visual clutter around it, black on white for text on a display quickly turns into “background beige”.
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