11th Hour Business Centers, based in Orlando, Fla., knows how to build the brand of both the sponsors and the company’s convention center/hotel clients at the myriad of conferences and conventions that come to town in trade show heavy Orlando.

The trick, especially with high end properties, is to give visibility to the sponsors of the show while maintaining the look of the facility where the show is being held. This is particularly crucial when there are multiple shows going on at the same time and at the same facility where it’s easy to lose the both the message and the messenger in a hodge-podge of inconsistent signage.

“We want the graphics to be representative of the property and meet the needs of each sponsor at the same time,” says Mark Jacques, director of print services for 11th Hour Business Centers. “We design a lot of the work and we focus on keeping it simple and understated while ensuring we communicate the message the client wants.”

An important way to differentiate the message of each sponsor, while making it consistent with the environment of the facility, is in the strategic placement of signage and finding ways to optimize the available space. 11th Hour Business Centers does this through the judicious use of floor, carpet, window, wall and pole graphics.

“As always, the convention industry is changing and evolving. Today’s conventions are focusing much more on creating a full-blown theme to life for their conferences. Converting a hotel shell into a visual storyboard is where meeting planners are going. They want these themes focused and heavily branded to ensure that the message of the event is creatively and visually illustrated,” says Jacques.

A recent example was the work the company did for SPIE (an international society for optics and photonics) and its sponsors, pictured here. 11th Hour Business Centers printed nine sponsorship floor graphics on LexJet Simple Indoor FloorAd laminated with LexJet Floor Gloss Laminate.

“If they’re expecting a tremendous amount of attendance we steer them away from floor graphics where they expect lines and lots of people gathering in one place simply because all that traffic will obscure the floor graphics. Instead, we recommend main thoroughfares where there will be a lot of people walking but not all bunched together,” says Jacques.

For the entryway window to the show, Jacques chose to use Indoor FloorAd here as well. He says it sticks well and then comes off easily after the show. For SPIE, the window graphic was 98 in. x 160 in. printed in two pieces on the company’s HP 60-in. Designjet L25500 latex inkjet printer.

Columns and walls were wrapped with Photo Tex for a repositionable and easily removed graphic in lieu of typical directional and information signage. “With the solutions available to us we have the capability of having signage in a lot of different and unique places, some of which we swap out on a daily basis. We can go in and pull off today’s schedule and put up tomorrow’s schedule in a matter of minutes. Our clients rely on us because we’re keeping their image in mind as we place and install the graphics, especially when there are other conventions going on in the same area,” adds Jacques. “When we do installations at one of our properties we guarantee we won’t cause any damage to the property, and if we do we pay for it. That gives us a definite advantage because we stand behind it.”