“I don’t know art, but I know what I like” as the saying goes. Art is subjective, art is personal, and while there are many conventions such as “form” and “color” that coincide with best practices for a desired visual, art is something where freedom of expression can be completely free. On the other hand, design does offer us well researched conventions and psychology for maximum readability and visual appeal.
When creating a trade show booth design there are so many elements from backwall style, accessories and digital media that must be thought out in order to have a cohesive and attractive booth experience. One of the more time intensive and costly aspects of your booth to produce are the graphics. These are your brand power, your 1-2 punch of impact your company depends on.
Check out this quick trade show booth artwork preparation quiz with a few common mishaps of trade show graphics that will help ensure your company looks its best on this very important day.
1) If a booth visitor is standing 3 feet from your graphics, how many inches high should your fonts be?
a. One
b. Two
c. Three
2) Quickly communicating your brand’s message is crucial – your primary message should be no longer than __ words long.
a. Four
b. Six
c. Eight
3) Time is valuable at trade shows. Your message is too long if it can’t be read within __ seconds.
a. Three
b. Six
c. Nine
4) Too many colors can be confusing and disrupt the logical flow of the reader’s eye. To maintain brand cohesion it is recommended to use no more than __ colors at once.
a. Two
b. Three
c. Four
5) To keep a good balance in the way your booth graphics are laid out, it is recommended to have a mixture of around __% images, __% text, and __% white space.
a. 80, 10, 10
b. 60, 20, 20
c. 40, 20, 40
6) The universally accepted __ or otherwise known as “spot colors” is a great way to make sure official brand colors are correctly matched when creating marketing materials between graphic designers and third party companies.
a. Pantone Matching System
b. Color Wheel System
c. Polaroid Matching System
7) To avoid a “jumbled” look in your text it is recommended not to use more than __ font types at once in your booth graphics.
a. One
b. Three
c. Five
8) Before becoming pixelated, an image that is 300 DPI (dots per inch) can be enlarged up to __ times.
a. One
b. Three
c. Nine
9) Arial, Futura and Helvetica are examples of __ fonts, widely accepted as the most easily read font type.
a. Decorative
b. San serif
c. Serif
10) Using a color wheel to locate colors that are __ helps you know which combinations are both appealing and easy to read close together.
a. Analogous
b. Complementary
c. Comparable
11) Brand fonts and logos are usually created as a __ file type because they can be enlarged without its pixels becoming distorted.
a. Vector
b. Raster
c. Bitmap
12) Your most important text and graphics should be kept at about __ feet above the floor to maximize readability.
a. 1 to 3
b. 4 to 6
c. 6 to 8
Answers: 1. B, 2. B, 3. A, 4. B, 5. C, 6. A, 7. B, 8. B, 9. B, 10. B, 11. A, 12. B