Extraordinarily Sustainable Exhibition Stand

Set by our Managing Director, Nathan, the brief was ‘make it look cool’. Becca, our Studio Manager, was given full reign to develop the concept and design. She began by creating a 3D visual of the stand, envisioning two distinct spaces. First, a striking 5m-long showcase wall, featuring layered Xanita and LED lighting. Second, an eco-bar area framed by wooden arches and foliage, which she designed to offer a warm, inviting space for conversations with prospective clients—and double as a photo opp. To tie these two areas together, she chose a TV canopy that bridges the two spaces together. The design itself was a tribute to Sir David Attenborough who has inspired Nathan, Becca, and the wider Imageco team on their quest for positive sustainable change.

The visuals were then taken by Dean, our 3D structural wizard, who used 3D engineering technology to convert the visuals into a prototype that could be moulded, adapted, and then act as the blueprint for the manufacturing stage. Dean’s experience and innovative thinking towards cardboard engineering has been an asset to the Imageco team, as he pushes the boundaries of structural design.   The exhibition stand spanned 8m x 3m and was entirely created from Xanita board. We applied Xanita board in its various guises including craft and white printed to build the frame of the exhibition stand. Once the 3D drawings were established, the detailed measurements were passed onto our production team, who cut out the design using our Zünd cutter.

Aside from the structural frame, we branded the floor to ensure a cohesive aesthetic to the entire stand. We did this by applying our unique flooring system, Clik, reusable tiles that can be coated in printed graphics, supplied via our HP Latex 800W. We chose these tiles as the graphics can be simply recycled and the tiles stored away for future use. In fact, we plan to use them at our next exhibition at the VM Display Show in London. To demonstrate our services, we also incorporated two acrylic panels that featured each of our print offerings as a layered effect black text, created with our swissQprint.

The feature piece of the exhibition stand was of course, Sir David Attenborough, who covered a huge proportion of our stand (3m x 2.4m). The layered feature was painstakingly crafted by our both our Zünd operators and designer Becca. The artwork behind the feature piece took around one day to design and then the drawing was kiss cut with Zünd cutter, following by Becca manually heating and cutting the Xanita board with a scalpel by hand. It perfectly demonstrates the raw, recycled fibreboard core of Xanita, contrasting with other elements printed with a realistic wood grain finish that makes it hard to believe that it’s actually card.

As always, we considered the environmental footprint of the stand before production began and chose materials and production methods that prioritised sustainability. And to have Sir David Attenborough featured on the stand we had to commit.
In total, 90 m2 of Xanita board was used and 27 m2 of floor graphics were printed. To determine the impact of this exhibition stand creation, we applied our carbon calculator tool, which compiles all data surrounding materials, wastage, travel and logistics. Creating this stand emitted a total of just 439kgCO2e! For comparison, we generated a report of the same exhibition stand using traditional materials such as MDF. The total carbon generated by this would’ve been a total of 1,258kgCO2e! That’s a 65% reduction in carbon emissions.