How can graphic design help your event succeed
Organising a succesful event is a big and difficult task. In a day and age where more and more events are digital, and are more than ever are organised, found and promoted through social media and other platforms on the internet, event organisers need to look further on how to get the most out of those tools. One of the ways to do that, is through design. In this blog I will explain how an event identity can transform your event or conference, how it interacts with your target audience and how you can improve your guests experience during the event.
Standing out with graphic design
A key part of organising an event or conference, is ofcourse to make sure people will visit it. Many variables influence how succesful your event becomes, but for a first edition of an event one of the most important ones is how you attract potential visitors to an event that has never taken place before. While this can be a difficult task, designing a great event identity matched with the right announcements of speakers/companies/artists can quickly excite potential visitors and push the public view from an initial concept to a full fledged, properly organised event.
Something all large and popular events have in common, is that they value their event identity design. This doesn't stop at a logo and a banner. To get the most out of an event identity you will need to streamline all announcements, advertising, on-site branding, posters, flyers and much, much more to create a recognisable and strong identity. Having more interactive of audiovisual content can improve the way potential visitors interact with your ads and how they view your festival, conference or other type of event.
The three pillars: concept & design, target audience, material
If an event identity is so important, how do I recognise a good event identity? This is something you can split in 3 categories, concept & design, target audience, material. A well thought out concept is the foundation of a proper identity for any company or organisation. Briefly summarised, a good concept is a visual translation of your event and its visitors.
With the first pillar in mind, having created a full-fledged concept, we've arrived to the target audience. An event identity should visually cater more to your target audience, than your event's programme. These two things usually go hand in hand, like how an electronic dance night might have a positive, uplifting and exciting design, while a heavy metal festival will feature a more in-your-face, dark and bold design. There are exceptions however, for example an exposition at an art gallery. Here you don't want to immediatly share the entire exposition directly, but rather focus on what type of people would visit it. Depending on the type of work being showed, you can either fit a small part of the collection within the identity to tease, or maybe it's better to create mystery in the designs and have people discover the work on-site. It's up to the designer and marketing team, to decide the best approach here.
Lastly, there's your material. It's important to see not just what the right design is for what target audience, but also to show how your event can stand out above all other dozens, if not hundreds, of events that take place in your area. To this this you need to do the same as everyone else and more. Some of the more basic materials are social media banners, thumbnails, lightly animated video's, but here the sky is the limit. There are many additional things you can do, such as creating an interactive website, creating an app to help the on-site experience, ticket alerts and more. You also add more value to your promotional tools, get more clicks, impressions and conversions if you create interactive and audiovisual content for your target audience to interact with. As mentioned earlier, when your promotional materials and event identity are properly streamlined and work in unison, graphic design becomes one of the keys to a succesful promotional campaign. Every good designer or creative agency is well aware of this.
On-site design
So once you've ran a succesful preperation for the event, maybe even having it sell out, the designing doesn't just stop there. Something that can improve the experience of your visitors and making sure they return for the next edition is another aspect of design: translating information.
From small, intimate concerts to massive festivals, it's important your guests are informed about time-tables, directions, facillities, parking etc. A pitfall of many on-site experiences of visitors can be that they either misunderstanding or are misinformed during the event. This is something that should be solved during the concept/design phase, it's important here to put the information above the design. Don't try to fit the information into an identity, but to make sure the identity facilitates and embraces information in a clear and legible way.
Having the information properly fitted in the identity doesn't only improve the way your guests experience the event, but will make it easier for employees, volunteers, food catering, artists or guest speakers as well. The last thing that looks good for your event, are miscommunications with the more important people at your event. A good example of this was at a Dutch metal festival in 2019, where are the headlining band dropped out after seeing their name removed from the top of the list of bands on the festival's poster, which wasn't part of the agreed deal between the band and the festival.
Conclusion
Hopefully you've learned a thing or two about what to look for when you're working on an event identity with a graphic designer or creative agency, and how to improve the way you reach your target audience for the first time before launching your event. From living room concert to a corporate conference, there's always room for graphic design to improve the event and the visitors' experience. Lastly, never be boring, but always original.