Venues, stands, merch and event decks
Events that exist on paper first
Two years at a full-cycle international event agency. Half of the work never reaches the guest. Before a venue lights up, it has to be zoned, wired for sound, lit and signposted.
- Event design
- Team leadership
What I did
Design Lead from 2022 to 2024. I led the visual side of events and coordinated teams of up to twenty people.
I kept what could not be delegated. Venue concepts, decks, wayfinding.
The main skill grew here, working with incomplete input. Event deadlines do not move, while the data keeps changing until the last day.
The company
GSI Global Team, a full-cycle international event agency, working since 2014. It takes an event from the idea to dismantling the structures.
Venue, stage, light, sound, catering, staff, wayfinding, merch, print, filming.
The clients
1win, Sber, Kaspersky Lab, G-Fest, ACA and others.
Separately, decks on digital currencies for the central banks of Libya and the UAE.
From Moscow to Dubai, the largest event drew up to nine thousand people.
One of the projects: G-Gate Manifest
An open-air festival in the desert outside Dubai, at Al Sahara Desert Resort, 1 March 2024.
A main stage and smaller zones on a single site. A dancefloor, a hookah lounge, a basketball court, a cinema room, a VIP area, a food court. 1win was the title sponsor.
Boundaries
- The programme, the line-up and the budget were set by the client. My part began where a decision becomes visible.
- Light, sound and rigging were done by contractors. I prepared the documents they worked from.
- Some of the agency's projects cannot be published. They are not here.
The identity comes first
Before the venue, the event's own brand gets drawn. The mark, its clear space, the palette, the typefaces.
A separate part of the guide covers what must not be done. Altering proportions, adding effects, placing the mark on a busy background. Every contractor then works from these pages.
What preparation looks like
Below are working documents from the festival. Not a polished deck for a client but the internal manifest the venue was assembled from.
An event exists as a set of diagrams long before it exists as a place: flow zoning, a map of overlapping sound, a fire show plan by point, the truss drawing, a pixel map of the screens, a lighting plot. Only then does it become somewhere people arrive.
The same document holds smaller inventions, such as the road signs on the highway. Instead of a person with a flag we put up reflective boards so cars could find the turn in the dark.
What it looks like before the site exists
The whole venue is modelled and rendered before the first truck reaches the sand. Sponsors see their zones, contractors see what they are building.
Hundreds of branded items
From there the venue breaks down into hundreds of separate objects, each sponsor with its own treatment.
Cups, wrappers, popcorn buckets, beanbags, aprons, ice barrels, fan barriers, wristbands, road signs. Each one has its own size, material and colour proof.
A separate story about the camel
The plan was for it to greet guests in a branded cloth, and the cloth had to be drawn and sewn in advance.
It turned out nobody knew what size to sew. We googled which camels live in the Emirates, found out they are one-humped, and estimated height and girth from photographs.
This is what preparation is made of. Half the tasks arrive with no input at all.
