signage

The Bata Shoe Museum celebrated its 20th anniversary in Toronto last year. To encourage guests to explore various spaces within the museum, organizers used a maze theme: At the entrance, guests were given “clue cards” that encouraged them to find the answers to puzzles by entering different galleries. Maze-like markings in hot pink on the floor served as directional signage that led guests into various parts of the venue.

Relate is a new conference series from software company Zendesk that is focused on exploring relationships and customer service. To tie to that theme, organizers offered a thank-you note station at the May event in San Francisco. The company’s in-house creative team designed witty cards and invited attendees to personalize them with a hand-written note expressing their appreciation to their colleagues. More than 300 cards were stamped and then mailed by Zendesk staff, and attendees took home an additional 1,000 cards and envelopes.

At Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs event in 2014, organizers eschewed a traditional red carpet in favor of stairs leading to the event space emblazoned with a custom typography message bearing the name of the occasion.

In 2013, New York’s famous Costume Institute gala had a punk-inspired theme. Nodding to the genre’s British and American origins, designers dressed the museum’s staircase with American and British flags made entirely of 150,000 red, white, and blue roses.

At the Corcoran Gallery of Art gala in Washington in 2012, a baroque-style gobo decked out the museum’s grand staircase, which is lined with marble statues and busts.

In its first year in Canada, 2014, the TED conference decked Vancouver Convention Center's stairs with color-blocked sections printed with the conference's tagline, "The next chapter starts here.”

Saveur hosted its Summer BBQ in New York in 2014. To get attendees excited about what would greet them within the outdoor culinary event, the words "cocktails," "sweets," "photo booth," "music” and others decorated a staircase.

Each year, E3 takes over multiple halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center, as well as its lobby areas and on the plazas outside. The show and its vendors take over stairs for marketing and branding, as in this example from 2013, which used both the stairs and surrounding columns.

Cole Haan took to New York in 2012 to introduce its Chelsea Pump, marketed as a shoe that can be worn late into the night. As part of the brand’s “Don’t Go Home” campaign, it hosted dance parties at a venue where the stairs bore messages announcing reasons to stay out late.

Event designer David Beahm used votive candles in a snaking pattern down the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairs for a private corporate event.

In a more straightforward take on the look, a display of 1,200 votive candles lined the stairs in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the opening-night party for Bullets Over Broadway in New York in 2014, greeting the 900 guests as they arrived from the St. James Theatre.

Sabra Dipping Company set up a pop-up dining experience called Hummus House in Washington in 2014. Within the space, stairs leading to the second floor were decorated with pots containing dried vegetables meant to represent various flavors of the brand’s hummus.

Moët & Chandon was the official champagne partner for Sex and the City 2, and as such, the brand worked with Warner Brothers to host an advance screening of the sequel at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago in 2010. The brand decorated the stairs at the venue with branded stars reminiscent of the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame.

Engadget hosted a meet-up for its readers in New York in 2011. Not missing an opportunity to brand the venue for 1,400 guests walking the stairs, the AOL-owned tech blog used them as surfaces on which to plaster its logo.

Kingman Ink created graphic renderings from 20 sessions at the conference. The artwork was displayed in the exhibit hall until the final day when organizers stacked them outside the workshop rooms. Pulizzi said they switched to a square format for the renderings because that shape makes them more suitable to be shared on Instagram.