Another Supply Chain Summit has come and gone. For those who don’t know, this is my company’s annual user conference and was held this year in sunny Orlando, Florida. Here’s a link to the micro site I built for it a few month’s ago.
My role was basically the same as years past which is, in a nutshell, art director, lead production artist and event photographer. Usually I do most/all of the large format printing, but this year I had some outside production help which was great because I had about 1 month less production time than I usually do. There’s no way I could have produced (by myself) everything that was created for this show. Instead of babysitting our inkjet printer, I used an outside company called Endpoint Direct to help produce most of the signs and banners. This helped me to not only make sure that everything was produced, but allowed me to focus on things I hadn’t in the past.
The theme this year was Your Challenge. Your Chance. Your Legacy. I really wanted to go with a more classy look and we thought having a museum feel would be nice. We decided to profile past figures in health care who had left a lasting legacy as well as current people who were building theirs.
Outside the conference area we put displays highlighting the likes of Clara Barton and Louis Pasteur. I know, it still looks like the inside of a hotel, but we got some great comments on the overall look and feel of the event.
We tried to carry the same feel to our “GHXcellence” winning customer’s displays.
Inside the general assembly room were banners of current industry leaders. These I printed. I created a total of 11 40″ x 13′ banners for this room. I also created (on site) pockets in each end of the banner and cut lengths of rigid hollow conduit so they could be hung. The lesson from this year’s Summit is: when you do your site visit, make sure a qualified av/rigging person is on hand to answer your questions.
Out in the main hotel lobby we were able to put up some gobos and 6′ x 10′ banners which looked great at night.
I think the main stage turned out well. An outside production company took my graphics and put it all together.
And there was plenty of event photography going on. I snapped the shutter 1030 times over 3 days (including all the photos you see in this post).
That’s about all I have to say on the subject at the moment. I don’t have any nice shots of the agenda booklet I created this year, so that will give me an excuse to put up another post in the near future.
If you’d like to see more photos taken at this year’s Summit, click here.
So I entered a few photographs into the Littleton Colorado Fine Arts Gallery’s 44th annual Eye of the Camera competition. Came out with first place in the color category. Go figure!
Here’s the winning photo and here’s the proof Edit: The 2011 winners are now posted.
Here’s a link to my Flickr set of the night this photograph was taken.
Wow, 2 posts in one day!
Just before the holiday break, we released our Supply Chain Summit microsite, to promote the upcoming 2010 SCS. I built this using DotNetNuke 4.95, Photoshop and old fashioned hand-coded HTML.
Alright, I guess it’s time to get back to this. I hope everyone had a great holiday season. Mine was nice and relaxing, but now it’s back to reality.
During the Supply Chain Summit, after setup and before tear down, my main job is event photography. My gear is simple. A Nikon D300, a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 and a Nikon SB-800 Speadlight. To assist shooting in really large areas with really bad light, I use The Black Foamie Thing with great success. For less than $3 to make, it’s amazing how well it improves your flash photography.
Wecome Reception
Main Sessions/Speakers
Award Winners
Entertainment
I’ll get around to another post soon, but in the time being, Merry Christmas everyone!
As I’ve mentioned in past posts, GHX puts on a yearly an annual user conference, the Supply Chain Summit. For me, this constitutes about 2.5 full months of full-on development and production. Everything you see in the following post was both designed and produced by me. We have an Epson 9000 ink-jet printer that prints on rolls of paper 42″ wide by 60′ long which I use for all print production.
The majority of my time is spent producing large format posters, banners and easel signs. I don’t have an exact number, but I estimate that I printed close to 350 linear feet of graphics for this show. About 120′ of that were for easel signs, which I then spray-mounted to foam core board. The rest was for booth graphics and hanging banners, which I needed to mount and hang, using velco and grommets (yes, we have a grommeting tool 
). The actual hanging of the banners was taken care by the in-house rigging team.
Here’s a 15′ banner that welcomed our attendees to our area of the hotel, which BTW, was the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, TN. This banner is 2-sided as well.
Just beyond the welcome banner was the registration area. Here you see some of my banners and easel signs.
A better shot of one of the side banners. Who’s that handsome devil in the photo? Oh right, that’s me.
In the main ballroom I hung 4 12′ tall banners. Here’s one of four.
Besides the main ballroom, we also took over the trade show floor of the Gaylord. We own a total of 7 booth properties and each one takes 1 to 4 individual posters. I also hung 8′ banners over each booth, except our largest property, which has a movie theater-style marquee (which also can accept it’s own custom graphics). Here’s a shot just after setup.
And another…
A close-up of one of the upper banners…
As I mentioned earlier, I created tons of easels signs. Around 60 in all. Here’s a close-up of one.
That’s it for now. In my next post I’ll talk about my role as the event photographer of the Summit.
I learned today that the GHX corporate website won a Silver Award for Best Design from Strategic Health Care Communications. A number of people contributed to the overall success of our site, but the design aspect…that was all me
One of my many jobs at GHX is to help our development team standardize the UI look&feel for all our products. Below is a screenshot of a recently released product upgrade. I provided guidelines for color usage and individual graphics for icons and buttons.
For our Healthcare Heroes campaign, my next task was to create some images that could be used in print. GHX attends 8-10 tradeshows every year, and we also advertise in multiple publications. I would need to come up with a few different images that could mixed and matched with different messaging (provided by others on the GHX Marketing team), depending on the audience.
This was my first image. We wanted something that spoke to all of our audiences, so it had to be generic yet dramatic. We also wanted something that would stand out from the typical medical advertising image.
I took this photo of Chicago while at our 2008 Supply Chain Summit. What’s a better image to representation a call-to-action, than a hero spotlight?
Our 2009 Supply Chain Summit was in Nashville, TN. On our initial site visit, I got a good look of the BellSouth building and I knew it would fit nicely into our concept.
My next image was one targeted toward middle management. The purchasing and materials management people. It had to speak to their professionalism, but still be cool.
This is composite of 4 images. The garage came from Getty Images, but I needed 2 images for the full garage (the originals were portrait format). The man is me. I put on my best suit and took photos of myself in my basement. The car is a 3-D model found online. Everything was composed in Photoshop CS3.This campaign was meant to not only target our customers, but our fellow employees as well. Our internal training program is called GHX University, so a fellow marketing person had the clever idea to play on that with an athletic t-shirt. This is what I came up with:
So how do you build a campaign around the concept of empowerment without actually using the word “empower”? This was the challenge presented to the GHX Marketing team earlier this year. While working with a fantastic brand & strategy team at Aspire Up, it became clear that the emotional connection we most wanted from our customers was one of empowerment. As a company dealing in the healthcare supply chain, our hope is that the use of our products gives customers the feeling that not only can they do their job, they can do their job better. More efficient. More cost effective. They can actually save a lot of money in healthcare. Thanks to a team with mad brainstorming skills, the concept of Healthcare Heroes was born. In an industry desperately needing change, the time for heroes to step up is upon us.
As the art director for GHX, it was my job to bring this concept to life. My first step was to come up with a simple, easy to recognize logo for our campaign. This was pretty much a no-brainer and in no time we were branding t-shirts, water bottles and anything else we could think of.
In my next post, I’ll expand on my branding efforts.