International Confex is the UK’s leading exhibition for event organisers, existing to create an environment to help support, inspire and drive the events industry forward. This event was held in Olympia London in February 2019.

I was working on Confex since the moment I joined Mash Media due to it being the largest show produced by Mash Media. This show is also ran at the same time as two other shows: Event Production Show & PA Show. As you can imagine al lot of work went into all three of these productions from everyone at Mash Media.

When I initial joined Mash Media I was given some design assets, an advert & the sales brochure (seen below). I was tasked with continuing the branding set in place by the previous designer.

Mash Media publish several magazines. They also use these as key promotion for their events due to them being sent out to key industry people that would likely share a common interested to anything within the MICE Industry.

Here is a breakdown of the adverts I created for our magazines

07.18 - This advert was created by previous designer before I joined and was one of the bases for the brands direction

08.18 - This advert is aimed as a call for speakers. We use these adverts to get potential speakers to register for the show. This is super important to ensure that all of the stages are packed full of interesting content for two days.

09.18 - 1 - This one is similar to the previous but is aimed at the associations within the MICE Industry. This advert is targeted at this audience due to there being a stage dedicated to the Association Events Forum.

09.18 - 2 - This was a developed look into the AEN advert. Here we tried to use testimonials and statistics to drive the user to register. We also used a new paint splash to try and make our brand have more available assets.

09.18 - 3 - Here we took a different approach to our adverts. We decided to play on the fact that Confex had been running since 1984. We though that vintage games could be a great way to show the idea of the events industry all coming together to connect. This yetis idea is what we developed in the end.

10.18 - We then developed the idea of the last advert but this time using Tetris as the basis for the advert. This also uses partners logo’s to show he idea of coming together.

11.18 - We wanted to take a new route into showing the idea of industry professionals meeting. We came up with the idea of creating a fake lonely hearts style adverts within an advert. This mock up features personas that you could find at the event.

Later down the line we realised our message was being lost due to confusing branding. We wanted to strip it right back and go back to using the original paint splash to create consistency. I believe this to be the most important thing when branding so was glad to see we was going in this direction. We decided to implement 3 core pillars with icon for each of these: Innovate, Originate & Create.

These core pillars would categories everything aspect of the show. Innovation was aimed towards the exhibitor side, like meeting exhibitors and looking at what they have to show off. Originate was about the various keynotes and engaging talks we had during the show. Create was all about making new connections with other professionals.

For the final print adverts we ran a DPS with a 3D render of the shows floorplan to highlight key areas of the event and show off what Confex 2019 had to offer. We tied in the 3 core pillar colours to categories the type of content in each area.

*3D render created by Freeman Digital

After designing the first re-wored advert I moved onto developing the website UI/UX.
Using ghetty images we used a neat video of some paint some to create a slow revealing header that would highlight the idea of discovery at the event.

The website featured things like the speakers, how to get there, different stages, contact page & a exhibit page to show of stats. This was my first time doing the UI for a Mash Media product and I’m really happy with the improvements I made.

In the run up to the event we also used various print promotions.
On the left we have a physical form used at association events to help us decide what content to put on one of the stages at Confex. On the right we have a exhibitor Christmas promotion, used as a promotion to try and drive numbers.

This also features some adverts that I did not design. These are: Gaudio Awards, Leister Conferences & Artifax.

During Confex 2019 we also had a new incentive for investors to promote themselves and attract more visitor at their stands at the show. When visitors registered at the show they was also given a passport with a chipped sticker that was paired with their visitor lanyard. In this document their are various stands all offering a raffle and to enter a chance of winning all you had to do was scan your passport at these stands. These passport partners where easy to locate as the show had a yellow path to help guide users to the sponsors within the passport.

I also created the signage for Confex 2019. About one month before the event the operations team at Mash provide me with sh a signage schedule for the event. This features the signage specs and message for each piece I need to create.
I would then begin working with the assets created for the previous event collateral.

Take a look below of how the everything ended up looking at the show…

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