Exhibition booth design, judged once the hall is full

We do not build stands. We plan and run the show around one: the brief to whoever fabricates it, the staffing, the schedule, and the days themselves. That is a useful place to be standing when you are deciding what to ask for, because it means watching a few thousand people walk past a stand over three days and seeing exactly which of them stop.

Most of what decides that was settled before anyone drew anything. The space was booked off a hall plan months earlier, the size was picked against a budget line, and the design brief arrived last. So here are the decisions in the order they actually get made, and what each one costs you once the floor is full.

The hall decides more of this than the stand does

A stand is designed on a screen. Lit evenly, viewed head on, alone. It gets built into a hall between two neighbours, under whatever lighting the venue happens to have, and it is seen by people walking past at about a metre a second, at an angle, with something else already in their eye.

Which makes position a design decision rather than a procurement detail. A corner space has two open sides and close to double the useful frontage of an inline one. A space sitting on the line between registration and the seminar rooms has the whole hall walking past it several times a day. A space one aisle over gets the people who came looking. None of that is fixable later with a better render.

Before doors on day one, go and stand at the mouth of your own aisle and read your stand from five metres at walking pace. It is an uncomfortable ten seconds and it is the most useful ten seconds of the build. Whatever survives that read is what the stand says. Anything below waist height is read by nobody, and anything at eye height is behind somebody's head from ten in the morning onward.

Every square metre is spent three times

A stand floor can only be three things, and they compete for the same space: open floor for visitors to stand on, working space for whatever your team does with them, and storage. The drawing always gives the third one away, because storage is the only one of the three that looks like nothing on a plan.

The plan is drawn from above. It is only ever seen from the aisle.

The queue is a design decision

Put a demo, a coffee machine or a prize draw on a stand and people will line up for it. The line forms facing the thing it is waiting for, so its backs are to the aisle, and a stand three metres deep runs out of room for it after about three people.

The fourth person stands in the aisle. So does the fifth. From twenty metres away the stand now reads as a wall of backs, which is the exact signal that stops the people you have not met yet from stepping in, and the floor manager will eventually ask you to clear it, because an aisle is a fire route before it is a marketing surface.

Three fixes, cheapest first. Shorten the demo, which is a content decision. Move the demo point to a side wall so the queue runs along the frontage instead of across it, which is a layout decision. Or book a deeper space, which is a budget decision somebody made a year ago. It is the same arithmetic that decides whether a session for a hundred people works or turns into queueing: throughput, not enthusiasm.

What a fabricator needs, and what to ask them

A stand contractor can only design against what they are given, and most briefs arrive as a logo, a size and a mood. What actually shapes a stand is duller, and some of it belongs to the venue rather than to you: every hall in Singapore publishes its own technical manual, and they differ in ways that change a design.

• The hall's technical manual, in full. Height limits, rigging rules, whether anything is allowed to hang, platform and ramp requirements, what the floor will take.
• Your position, and which sides are open, plus the build heights either side of you if the organiser will say.
• Where the power drop is and how much of it you have. The floor box position decides where the counter can go, and the counter decides the layout.
• How many staff are on the stand at once, and what each of them is doing. Three people who talk to visitors need a different plan from one person and a screen.
• What has to be locked away, in boxes, counted. Storage sized from a real number survives value engineering. Storage sized from a guess does not.
• The messages in priority order, with the one that has to survive a five metre read named as such.

Then four things worth asking before anything is signed. A scale plan with people drawn on it, because a render has no queue in it. What is rented and what you own afterwards, and if you own it, where it is stored between shows and at what cost. Who is on site during show days and how fast they answer when a light fails on day two, which is a different question from who builds it. And install and teardown as their own lines with hours against them, which is usually where a cheap quote and an expensive one turn out to be the same quote.

Writing that brief on a client's behalf and then running the floor once the stand is up is one of the six things we do.

Load-in is the part nobody briefs

The build window belongs to the whole hall and it is shorter than it looks. What eats it is not the building. It is the marshalling yard, the goods lift and the queue for both, and a heavy custom build has to go in early, so the schedule ends up set by your contractor's slot rather than by you.

Two questions save the most pain. When does the space become available, and when must the aisles be clear, because those are different times and the second one is the real deadline. And what state is the space in when you get it, because a hall floor is not always the level somebody drew on.

Then get the graphics and the electrics signed off the evening before doors rather than on the morning. Every show has a moment around eight on the first day when the whole hall discovers its problems at once, and there is one duty electrician for all of it. A snag found the night before is a phone call. The same snag at eight is a queue, while your own team is arriving and the organiser is briefing. Build days and show days belong on one document with a named owner against every line, which is all a run of show really is.