Over the summer of 2014 I was assigned the task of designing v6e Ltd’s stand for November’s World Travel Market in London. v6e Ltd specialises in multilingual commentary devices and last year over 50,000 delegates visited the show, this was not going to be a small project!

 

As it was the first time v6e Ltd were exhibiting at the show they wanted to make an impact, furthermore, they were using the show to launch their revolutionary new commentary system called Oblecto! Therefore, even greater importance was given to the design of the stand. Nathan Scott (Managing Director) and I discussed many ideas and in the end we came up with a giant hollow globe.

 

After consultation with several fibreglass specialists the final design was complete and ready to be made. The globe was 3.6m in diameter with a section cut out at the top for lighting and ventilation, and another part cut out at the bottom for stability. We worked closely with Nick Spreadbury who owns Berkeley Glass Fibre solutions and with our plans he created the globe in 5 identical segments and 1 door segment, each segment was orange (Pantone 158C) to match the company's colours.

We then obviously wanted to paint the world on to the outside of the globe. I began by researching what paint was most suitable for fibreglass and on a gel coat, this involved talking to boat and aeroplane painters. It seemed that most paints would work, it was just finding one that would not chip. 

 

In the end we chose to use, Hammerite which would produce a smooth finish. 

 

I first drew out the map on a computer program called Illustrator and made a plan so I knew what was going on each segment. We wanted all of our customer’s countries to be visible on the globe, however, as a lot of the countries were beneath the equator we had to edit and re-scale our world!  

 

To help with the sketching I had each of the world’s segments printed onto 2m paper, from that I drew the countries freehand onto the globe. 

For the graphics we wanted something that was not going to take any attention away from the globe or make the stand look too busy. As the saying goes ‘a photograph says a 1000 words’, we therefore felt that the use of photos would give visitors an idea of what the company does. 

 

By only having a banner of photographs it meant the design looked clean and combined with the two dictionary definitions it made an impact. 

Inside the globe we had a display of our current products fixed to the wall, our older products were positioned on either side and the new product ‘oblecto’ took centre stage. The design of the stand enabled our customer to have a hands on experience of our products, and in particular to see the benefits of oblecto.

 

At the entrance to the globe you could see our other products, L-Verbum and Sermo. The reason behind having oblecto in the centre was so customers standing outside of the globe could not see it, it was a secret, they had to be invited in to experience and interact with oblecto

 

In the centre of the globe was a table with the screens of the systems as well as the driver keypads. Visitors were also able to interact with these devices. Above the table was a tv screen that continuously streamed a presentation and timeline of v6e and oblecto.

For the WTM we wanted to have "freebies" to give out to the people attending the show.  We decided to have pens, a tote bag, a stress globe, pillow pockets that contained our headphones and an ice scraper. 

 

The stress globes were originally blue and green but as we were having a giant black and orange one, I liased with Total Merchandise to see if we could change the colours to match our corporate image, and also to have our logo. Luckily, we could! 

 

For the tote bag I created a design/illustration that included the 'Li Family' as they had featured on previous marketing material. The idea was to again, communicate what v6e does to a range of different people and nationalities and also have a fun and engaging bag for people to keep! During the event we had people who had seen our bags come and find us because they loved the bag so much. 

The World Travel Market ran from 3rd-6th November 2014 and was very successful. The launch of oblecto was a huge success. The stand and merchandise had people talking, and often people came back for more. A lot of important contacts were made and we all had an amazing week!

 

We look forward to returning next year!