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 they walk in, the venue has to be zoned, wired for sound, lit and signposted.
- Event design
- Team leadership
What I did
Design Lead from 2022 to 2024. I ran the visual side of events and coordinated teams of up to twenty people.
Whatever couldn’t be handed off, I did myself. Venue concepts, decks, wayfinding.
This is where I got good at the thing I use most, working with half the information. Event deadlines don’t move, and the details keep changing until the last day.
The company
GSI Global Team is a full-cycle international event agency, running since 2014. It takes an event from the first idea to taking the structures back down.
Venue, stage, lighting, sound, catering, staff, wayfinding, merch, print, filming.
The clients
1win, Sber, Kaspersky Lab, G-Fest, ACA and others.
And separately, decks on digital currencies for the central banks of Libya and the UAE.
Anywhere from Moscow to Dubai, and the biggest of them drew up to nine thousand people.
One of the projects: G-Gate Manifest
An open-air festival out in the desert beyond 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 can’t be published. They aren’t here.
The identity comes first
The event gets a brand of its own before the venue gets anything. The mark, its clear space, the palette, the typefaces.
A whole section of the guide is what you’re not allowed to do: stretch the proportions, add effects, drop the mark onto a busy background. Every contractor works off these pages afterwards.
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
We model and render the whole venue before the first truck ever reaches the sand. Sponsors get to see their zones, contractors get to see what they’re building.
Hundreds of branded items
From there the venue breaks down into hundreds of separate objects, and every sponsor gets its own treatment.
Cups, wrappers, popcorn buckets, beanbags, aprons, ice barrels, crowd barriers, wristbands, signs out on the road. Every one of them has its own size, material and colour proof.
A separate story about the camel
It was meant to meet guests in a branded cloth, which had to be drawn and sewn well in advance.
Turned out nobody knew what size to sew it. We googled which camels live in the Emirates, learned they’re one-humped, and worked out the height and the girth off photographs.
That’s what getting ready actually looks like. Half the tasks turn up with nothing attached.
