Innovation Across All Design Disciplines

VISUAL DESIGN, GRAPHIC + PRINT

With two major trade shows a year, SPI relies on PAX’s cross-functional nature, creative problem-solving, and eye for creative direction. A herculean effort, I reengaged with my designer background and assisted in-house designers and outside agencies to creative direct and produce a variety of media: Booth graphics, email blasts, signatures, promotional product videos, informational videos, product presentations, and magazine advertisements. I also sat on the committee is in charge of the overall booth flow, product placement, and execution.

NEW FEATURE DESIGN

In addition to this is PAX’s primary responsibility: conceptualizing, wireframing, designing, and prototyping a variety of new features and conceptual products for all platforms – seatback, mobile, and even new, innovative hardware, such as in-arm displays and new types of interactive interfaces, such as wall projectors or gyroscopic remote controls. I balanced my team’s active customer projects with the ~4 month timeframe needed in creating conceptual designs for each trade show in a series of alternating design sprints.

VIDEO CREATION

While attending the trade shows and supporting important customer and potential customer meetings, I was also responsible for documenting the week-long trade shows and creating exciting video content for the All Hands Meetings SPI would host for all internal employees at the close of each show.

RECAP VIDEOS

With the end of each trade show, SPI would host an All Employee meeting where, among other topics, a recap was shown for those employees who could not attend, which was the majority of the company. Because so many people back home are the ones who make a trade show’s success possible, these videos are an important showcase of everyone’s efforts. A blend of business and fun, I filmed and created each of these videos for over 3 years.

NEW FEATURE CONCEPT VIDEOS

Trade shows are the time to workshop SPI’s conceptual feature work for both hardware and software, with SPI leveraging the face-to-face interactions with both prospective and current customers to get realtime feedback.

Most concepts, however, are highly-innovative, often abstract, and difficult to describe with mere words or images. Each year I would source, project manage, and creative direct animation studios to establish each feature’s style guides, scripts, storyboards and voice acting.

BOOTH GRAPHICS

Large-scale graphics always required both me and my team to shift gears from the digital realm and back to the world of print. Aerospace is a very traditional industry, with many corporations erring on the side of clean, crisp, albeit sterile and safe brand identities.

Inflight Entertainment as a sub-industry tends to have more personality, and as creative director for each show, I endeavored to consistently break this status quo, using the competition’s cold brands to our advantage and leaning into SPI’s subculture and personality to help us stand out among all other trade show booths. I would work with vendors, SPI Corporate, executive leadership and product management each trade show season to create a unique but achievable look.