Event Creative Development: How Design Elements Elevate Your Event
We love events whether they're in person or virtual. Having beautifully crafted design elements elevates your event and helps engage your visitors and/or viewers.
From full sound designed immersive events, to virtual conference openers and presentations we've done them all and love learning and sharing from our experiences.
This page is dedicated to our tips n' tricks, takeaways, and how-to's on hybrid events, event design, and visual production.
This week, the 2023 Promax North & Latin America Awards celebrated innovation, creativity, and achievement in the region’s entertainment marketing industry. This event is one of the five ceremonies that Promax will host this year around the globe. The graphics packages for all of these awards shows, including the 90-second animated intro, was designed and produced by our team at Elevation. Creating this piece celebrating our peers around the world - a group that we know has high expectations - was equally exciting and daunting.
Part of that mix of emotions had to do with our long-standing relationship with Promax. Our team attended our first PromaxBDA conference many years ago, and we instantly knew it was an organization we wanted to be involved with. Promax provided an opportunity to connect with the community, meet up with clients, and be part of the design environment of peers. Our Artistic Director Dianne Frisbee recalls the excitement from her first conference, “It was such a thrilling experience to be able to see amazing work and hear directly from the creators. We quickly decided it was a community we wanted to be part of and to support.”
Promax has meant a lot to our team, so when they approached us with the opportunity to collaborate with them on the design for their 2023 awards shows, we were both extremely eager and a bit trepidatious. We are a small tight-knit team, and the chance to both celebrate great design and creative thought in our field as well as...
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In school, most kids would grumble when the teacher would assign a presentation. While the rest of the kids were groaning, I was secretly so excited. Was it because I was a nerd? Yes. But also, I love presentations. It was a chance to put on a mini-show for the rest of my classmates. I would try to make my presentations as entertaining as possible, while still packing in enough educational content to get a good grade on the assignment.
While I still love presentations to this day, I can understand why many people don’t. Public speaking can be intimidating. All eyes are on you, and a lot can be riding on your presentation. Whether it’s pitching a client, debuting a new product, or unveiling a lineup of network programming, the future of your business could be at stake.
Plus, most presentations are just plain boring.
We’ve all been there. When we hear the word presentation, many of us think about overstuffed Power Point slides and some executive droning in a monotone voice. Most presentations are terribly dull and disrupt our work days.
But they don’t have to be.
In this article, I’m going to share with you four presentation principles to help you take your presentation to the next level. Follow these guidelines, and not only will you avoid being boring, but you’ll create engaging presentations crafted to effectively get your point across.
1) Consider your audience first
The most important aspect of your presentation isn’t your slide deck. Or even you.
It’s your audience.
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The metaverse is here, and it is already making huge waves. From art to gaming to sports collectibles, several industries are seeing seismic shifts in how communities interact, how creators get paid, and how brands can engage with their fans and customers. Much like how the advent of both the internet and social media radically redefined our digital lives, the metaverse has the potential to have a similar impact on how we interface with each other.
The event industry is a prime sector to see the positive impact of the metaverse in action. Here are a few ways we think the next wave of internet technology will have a transformative effect on events, both in-person and virtual.
Enhanced Virtual Events
As 3D digital spaces are a major component of the metaverse, virtual events leveraging the metaverse promise to be more engrossing and engaging. Rather than a series of streamed presentations and Zoom calls, virtual events can offer a space for attendees to explore and interact. This can mimic the experience of going to an event, and lead to more spontaneity for the event-goer. But, there’s so much more potential than recreating the experience of going to an expo hall. Virtual 3D spaces can give an event a unique presentation that would be impossible just through video streaming or financially impractical if done in the real world. A 60 foot tall Ariana Grande performing would definitely be out of scope of most events’ budgets. But it happened in her wildly popular Fortnite...
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Your venue is booked. Your speaker lineup is set. Your tickets are selling. It looks like you have everything set up for a successful event.
Except you might be missing a huge opportunity.
From keynote addresses to in-depth panels, your event is a content goldmine. Your event should be providing a ton of valuable insights to attendees, but you can also share that value with a larger audience by repurposing and remixing your event’s sessions into sharable online content. The basic premise is based off of Gary V’s Content Pyramid: You take one piece of major “pillar content,” and strategically adapt it into multiple smaller pieces of content. An hour long video of an interview could be adapted into several shorter videos, a blog post, a podcast, and dozens of social media graphics and video clips. Instead of having one piece of content for one audience, you have multiple pieces of content that can reach a much wider audience. And you never know which of these will catch fire online and be the thing to propel your brand to the next level.
Here are a few ideas on how to create a content plan for your event in a way that will help build your brand, grow your audience, and promote your next event.
Prerequisite: Record Everything
If you have a virtual event or a hybrid event, then your sessions should be set up for high quality livestreams with great audio and video. Make sure you are recording, archiving, and backing up each session. But if your event is in-person only, you still...
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1,920 pixels wide. 1,080 pixels tall. If you work with video, there’s a comfort to seeing those dimensions. Whether you call it 1920x1080, 1080p, or just HD video, this format has dominated our digital lives for well over a decade. Driven by the popularity of HDTVs, the aspect ratio of 16x9 has become the default standard for video, both on traditional broadcast and online. Even as resolution on TV sets have evolved from 720p all the way up to 4k UHD, the 16x9 aspect ratio (or the relationship between the height and the width of a frame) has stayed the same. By now, 16x9 is classic.
And sometimes, classic can mean boring. Don’t get me wrong. 16x9 is great when appropriate, which is most of the time. But there are definitely cases where you want to think outside the rectangle and consider creating your content in formats other than 16x9. Whether you are running an in-person expo, a hybrid event, or a marketing campaign, here are ways you can implement non-standard format video to enhance whatever your brand is doing.
Epic Events
People attend events for many different reasons: to learn something, to meet someone, or to feel something (hopefully excitement). Companies and brands hold events to deliver these experiences to their most ardent fans, their most loyal customers, and/or leaders of their industry. Utilizing non-standard format video can help deliver a memorable event and further your organization’s goals.
- For Keynote Presentations: For upfronts and conferences,...