Large Format
Print and signage built to work at scale, not just on screen
Most graphic design gets judged up close: on a screen, in a hand, across a desk. Large format has a different solution. A banner stand gets read from across a room in a few seconds, competing with a hallway of other stands, so the hierarchy has to work at a glance or it doesn't work at all.
The pieces here are university programs, research centers, and campus events, most of them built for the same 3000R retractable stand. That constraint shapes the design more than people expect: the same footprint and viewing distance every time, but the message, the palette, and the visual weight all have to shift depending on whether the audience is a research funder or a student walking past on a Friday.
Production discipline doesn't change at this scale, it matters more. Color that looks fine on a monitor can shift badly at banner size, and a mistake that would be a minor annoyance on a flyer is an expensive reprint on a six-foot stand. I still preflight, still check real spot color when the job calls for it, and still look at a proof before anything goes out at full size.
The red field does the work a photo of a guitar alone couldn’t: it reads as urgency and warmth at the same time, so the piece stops someone walking past rather than blending into hallway clutter. Food and music are named plainly because that’s what gets a stressed student to actually show up.
The hex pattern was built to survive the scale test a banner stand demands: legible from across a room, not just at arm’s length. Cool blue keeps it credible rather than flashy, which matters more standing in a hallway next to a research audience than it would on a printed handout.
Four separate moments of kids actually engaged, not posed for the camera, cropped tight enough that the energy of the room still carries at banner-stand scale. The grid holds real photography’s chaos inside a structure clean enough to read as one image from a distance.
Motion blur on the feet, sharp on the faces, the difference between a banner that documents an activity and one that makes you want to join it. The saturated pink field is what lets it work as a stand-up piece read from twenty feet, not decoration for its own sake.
Shown here as proof the print system and the web system share a visual language, not a separate decision made by someone else. Same type, same palette, same voice, so a student recognizes the program whether they saw the banner stand or the site first.
“Register Now” earns the top third of the panel because a stand’s entire job at a symposium entrance is getting someone to act before they’ve walked past it, not to be admired up close. Everything else on the piece exists to move a viewer’s eye down to that instruction.
The whole panel is one object photographed across an extreme value range, black at the top and incandescent at the bottom, with the threads holding through both. Letting the flame light fall on the machined face rather than lighting it evenly is what makes the steel look hard even at trade-show viewing distance.
Water carries the whole composition, so the design choice was mostly restraint: keep type off the image and let the color and texture of the scene do what a research program’s stand actually needs, which is credibility from across a lobby rather than decoration up close.
A tribute piece at this scale has one job, to look like the person the room actually remembers, so retouching stayed minimal and the expression was chosen over a more flattering but less true frame. The dark field keeps the focus on the face.
Gold instead of the expected industrial gray or blue was a deliberate break from every other engineering stand in the same hallway. The partner logo stack, Purdue alongside NREL, Oak Ridge, and half a dozen universities, had to stay legible at full banner height without turning the bottom third into a cluttered sponsor wall.
A second stand for the same center, built around the facility and the people rather than the partner network. The building establishes it’s a real place, the researchers at the monitors establish the work is analytical as much as physical, and the tank at the bottom grounds it in actual manufacturing. “Empowerment Through Simulation” earns the bottom third because it’s the one line meant to land after everything else has been scanned.
Horror typography earns its place here because the event is supposed to be a little unsettling; a clean sans-serif would undersell the fun of it standing at the door. The zombie photography is lit hard and close so the piece reads as an invitation to something a little dangerous from across the lobby.