FLYR Event Booth
Creative Lead, 2021 to 2023
A week or two into the job, I learned FLYR needed a booth for our biggest event of the year, two months away, and that we had nothing. No structure, no vendor, no design. I wrote the brief, found the designers, and directed the booth that carried FLYR’s event presence for the next two years.
I joined FLYR as Creative Lead in October 2021. World Aviation Festival, the company’s biggest event of the year, was two months away in London, and FLYR had no booth of any kind. We were a young software company about to stand on a floor full of established aviation vendors, and the booth had to make an unknown name the most interesting thing in the hall.
I started with a brief instead of a vendor. Before contacting anyone, I wrote the requirements: the booth had to display video content, hold open conversation areas, feel like a building inside a building with its own faux ceiling, and carry a little magic overhead, something that would draw people in.
The moodboard set the direction: sleek, futuristic, and aerodynamic, drawn from the same visual language as the aircraft our customers fly. Curved white surfaces, a canopy that reads as a wing section, and lighting that traces the structure’s edges. Each reference I pulled was annotated with exactly what to take from it: screen proportions from one, an open floor plan from another, an overhead form from a third.
Left, reference imagery gathered for the brief, annotated with the overhead options for the sky video. Right, the flagship render that resolved it into one lit panel set into the canopy.
On a trade show floor, everything competes at eye level. The plan was to win above it. The ceiling carried a sky animation made for the booth, open sky with aircraft passing overhead, and the main wall carried an LED screen running FLYR’s story. Motion above eye level is visible from across the hall. People looked up, said wow, and walked in.
There was no time to run a normal vendor search. I asked the event organizers for their approved booth builders, sent the brief, specs, and moodboard to the shortlist, and got two proposals back. One of them was close. I went with that vendor and directed the design through a few rounds of revisions: taller screen areas, an open floor instead of an enclosed meeting room, and the ceiling treatment that made the concept work. Each change was mine to propose; stakeholders approved as we went.
Two of the revisions I proposed, annotated on reference imagery gathered for the brief: a screen panel facing out to the floor at that scale, and an open one-on-one area in place of an enclosed room. The final render, from the ceiling angle, shows where they landed.
The flagship debuted at World Aviation Festival in London in December 2021 and traveled to Aviation Festival Asia in Singapore that February. From there it became a system. Venues changed, budgets changed, ceiling heights changed, and the booth adapted: shorter in one hall, longer in another, and by 2023 a version with an enclosed glass meeting room, something the flagship’s footprint never had space for. When a venue gave us the room, the system absorbed it. The design language held through every variation.
The flagship in Singapore, February 2022, and the 2023 variation with an enclosed glass meeting room. Same design language, different footprint.
Event organizers advised that they wanted the FLYR booth visible, and began giving us priority placement on the floor. The booth and its variations carried FLYR's presence at airline industry events from late 2021 until the 2023 rebrand retired the identity it was built for.
A booth briefed from nothing in two months held up as a system for two years.
