Chapter 21, What Once Was

Last year's SLG Publishing booth for Comic-con International was probably one of the largest, all corrugated displays ever built. (I'm totally making that up, but it was certainly very large).

The columns and arches that you see below were 20-feet-wide and 15-feet-tall and were held together with special, "non-standard" state-of-the-art, top-secret technology. Each column and arch structure could collapse into a box that was 6-feet x 3-feet x 6-inches and could be assembled without tools of any kind in under 30-minutes.

(Photo by Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics)

You can see last year's floor plan here.

This year's display is smaller in some ways and larger in others. We've eliminated the column and arch structures in favor of four columns topped with the SLG logo. The floor plan is now designed to create a kind of convention-within-a-convention atmosphere where visitors will be able to meet their favorite artists and writers--and discover new favorites--in SLG's mini-artist alley and then shop for SLG merchandise in our three distinct shops: We'll have a T-shirt shop, a toy store and a book store.

One thing that is always hard to imagine when designing a display of this sort is how people will interact with the space. When you look at the diagram of last year's display (here), it looks open and easy to navigate; when you look at the photograph above you see a different picture.

Comic-con is a crush of sorts and at any one time (as a presenter) you have hundreds of people trying to find their favorite comics, meet their favorite artists and otherwise occupy your limited real estate. As we design this sort of display, our goal is to make it easy for the visitor to do what visitors will do, while ensuring that the space is easy to maintain and that the display is quick to setup.

SLG is a small company and--unlike other presenters with comparable booth space--everyone from the president of the company to the husband of the editor-in-chief (me) works to put together in a single day a space that is about the same size as a small house in square-footage and will have the kind of foot traffic each day that your local mega grocery store hopes to have in a week: Thus our mini-convention model.

The retail space is large and open to accommodate browsers, while our artist alley section is streamlined and linear to accommodate lines of visitors. With any luck this year's floor plan may actually function as planned, but more than likely, it will look something like the photograph above.

Design is an ever-evolving process: I hope the SLG's fans will enjoy the little habitat that we've created for them this year.