Alberta Design Blog

The Red Deer Homeshow,  this weekend at the Westerner , is one of the biggest trade shows in Red Deer, and we’ve been bustling all month preparing numerous projects for the “really big show”. One could argue Trade Shows are one of the more wasteful marketing activities one could pursue – you need large flashy booths, lots of give-aways (read: print destined for the trash) and if you are a large firm at the Calgary Oil-show, you might even need beer girls to spice things up. All of this amounts to a lot of extra raw materials being used and a lot of it is unavoidably wasted, trapped in the bottom of someones show-bag, never to be seen again.

I always recommend a “use what you actually need” approach to marketing. Buy the right amount of brochures, even though they get “cheaper” when you purchase by the pallet. Drive customers to websites where they can get further information rather than printing a large catalogue. These are all earth saving tips for an industry that is wasteful by it’s very nature. (Does the world really need another tri-fold brochure?)

A good piece of hardware might last 10 or 15 years! The average message might last 1 year.

Trade shows are the opposite of this ethic: you need lots of material, it has to be compelling, and messages are almost always timely – they don’t carry over year-over-year. Shows are messy, busy and you need to set up and break down fast, which usually increases waste. So what can you do? read more

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Early this week, Kayla and I attended the Red Deer Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours Trade Show. I have to be honest. I love trade shows, but I rarley attend them. I usually equip them.

I have to say though, the host, Red Deer’s One to One Fitness was very accommodating. It was pretty hard to set up in a gym, and it actually worked out terrific for us (we were against a red wall).

In all, we had prizes, takeaways, portfolios and a slide show to inform attendees. That and two nice people to chat with. It was a standard show for the Chamber – 2 hours, so it’s a fast and furious race to meet leads and get into the buffalo chili as fast as possible. What a great show. I’ve had hot and cold luck with these events and this one was great – must have been the slide show.

We will certainly be taking in the Chamber shows for the rest of this winter season!

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We recently completed two tradeshow banners for Pink Suede Imaging. They turned out so wonderful I felt the need to blog. Pink Suede is a service that assists women in the area of personal image. Think of them as the What Not to Wear of Red Deer. If Clint & Stacy came to pay a visit I think they would be rather pleased. An awesome  opportunity for central Alberta women to step-up their confidence.

The flirty design was a nice change of direction here at Redpoint. Especially because we were able to use a colour we don’t often choose out of the swatch-book… PINK, and lots of it. With fashion on the brain we decided to create a look that women would be drawn to. We incorporated some girly illustration to play off the looseness of the logo – so much fun! I am a doodler at heart, so it was a delight to be able to create artwork for these banners.

The text creates a curvy female silhouette, which compliments the Pink Suede motto Inner Confidence, Outward Style quite nicely. The words within the image represent Pink Suede and highlight services. The pink scalloped header gives the illusion of a boutique window which ties in the polka-dot pattern in the background. We really wanted to push the detail by adding in illustrated icons and ribbons. The goal was to project a visually compelling piece that targets women specifically.

Check out the banners, and Pink Suede for yourself at the Bower Place Shopping Center on December 18, 19 & Boxing Day.

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Today we visited the “Let’s Talk 2008” tradeshow at Parkland Mall in north Red Deer. It’s an annual event in which the City departments descend upon one of the Red Deer malls and meet and greet the citizens of Red Deer. What’s so significant about this? We did the graphic design on most of the tradeshow displays, and a good portion of the brochures and posters used in the event.

A big congratulations goes to the City Communications department, for pulling the project off, it was a massive undertaking to coordinate will all the departments.

The statistics are a bit staggering: 24 tradeshow displays, 11 posters, 9 brochures and 2 literature displays… and that’s just this past February! If we look back and include work for previous projects, those numbers are even higher. It was amazing to do that many pieces and ensure that they worked in concert with one another, but didn’t look like each was based on a template.

The rewarding part of the process, was the comment we received from one of our contacts in the communications department – that members of the public actually were commenting that the displays worked nicely together and weren’t too similar. Our goal was achieved!

A big congratulations goes to the City Communications department, for pulling the project off, it was a massive undertaking to coordinate will all the departments.

One side note, from a production side: we concluded that even in something that appears simple to output (large format printers that create the displays), colour profiling is again very key. We were diligent in working with our display production team to ensure we had accurate colour output. Even though it’s not a printing press, it’s just as important to match your profiles.

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