Developing Dreams are delighted to have won two World Exhibition Stand Awards (WESA) for Small is Beautiful, designed and built for Visit Brighton.
The stand, which is an artistic rendering of Brighton’s landmarks and its principal events venues, won gold in the category ‘Best stand up to 24 square metres’ and silver in the category Best stand at a Travel and Tourism Event.
Julia Gallagher, Head of Sales, Partnership & Marketing at VisitBrighton, said:
“We are thrilled that our stand has been recognised by WESA – it truly is a unique concept that marries great design with cutting edge technology. We wanted to give our trade show visitors a strong visual sense of Brighton whilst demonstrating the excellence of our creative, digital and IT sector, which is why we worked with locally-based company, Developing Dreams, to create Brighton in miniature, showing in detail the proximity of our conference and meetings venues and hotels. We’re really looking forward to using the stand at future exhibitions to inspire business visitors to choose Brighton for their next conference to accelerate post-COVID recovery for the sector.”
As part of the project, Developing Dreams undertook primary and secondary research to get under the skin of the target audience for VisitBrighton. Personas based on the research findings were created as well as mood boards to give a flavour of what the exhibition experience should feel like.
One of the key directives from the client was to make something different from the many generic stands they saw at show after show. By making something unique and by breaking convention we were able to represent the progressive nature of Brighton; from three key concepts the idea of a three dimensional miniature Brighton was born.
Apart from being visually appealing, the stand also needed to have the functionality of a meeting space where visitors engage with the VisitBrighton team and venue representatives. In order to blend in with the stand aesthetic and produce a memorable experience and a talking point, the West Pier was turned into a practical and stylish table and stools and the Palace Pier became a functional high level one-to-one meetings bar.
Rachel Clark, Chief Executive of the West Pier Trust, said:
“We love the West Pier table and chairs – it’s a completely original idea which succeeds in being quirky, humorous and practical whilst also respectful of the beloved West Pier ruin.”
As part of the stand design we created an innovative modular system that uses the packing boxes to create the hidden base structure of the stand itself so that it transforms from a packed down transportable system into a complete 5m x 3.5m display stand without any additional parts other than nuts and bolts. The entire installation was fabricated using laser cut plywood. This technology enabled us to digitally conceptualise a modular system that matched the real world creation to the millimetre, and to create super accurate 3D models to share with the client throughout the design process.
The exhibition stand had its first outing at The Meetings Show in London Olympia on 26th – 27th June in 2019. It went onto Seville for EMEC 2020 in February 2020 to promote Brighton hosting EMEC 2021.
Small is Beautiful really stood out at The Meetings Show and grabbed people’s attention which resulted in additional sales leads. The number of Visit Brighton’s enquiries increased by an incredible 164% on their attendance at the previous year’s show.
Special thanks go to:
VisitBrighton for giving us the creative freedom to come up with Small is Beautiful and being a pleasure to work and collaborate with.
Rich Plastow for his amazing designs.
Exhibit Printing for their helpfulness, friendliness and superhuman efforts producing all the laser cutting for us to very tight deadlines.
3Dify for their technical advice, creative input and physical construction of the exhibition stand.
The silver award in the category ‘Best stand at a Travel and Tourism Event\’ was a joint submission with the SMP Group who are providing the logistics for the stand – storage, transport and assembly at trade shows.