A design success!
About a month ago, one of our marketers came to me and said "Dave! I've got a really fun project for you!"
Naturally all of the hair stood straight up on the back of my neck. Any experienced designer knows that the correct response to that statement is to point the requester to another designer. "Oh, I'm really busy right now, but I think Ann has a few minutes to spare."
"Fun", you see, is marketer-speak for "enormous time sucker with little or no payoff".
Unfortunately, I'm the only designer on our team, so the only person I could fob this task off on is... me. I sighed. "What is it, Steve?"
Steve explained to me that our group was going to sponsor a 10' x 10' carpet square at the Professional Developer's Conference, in LA this year, and that we could print anything we wanted on it.
After conferring with the vendor who was actually going to print the carpet, I found out that Steve wasn't kidding -- we really could print anything we wanted: 200 ppi, 24-bit color, any file format I wanted.
After some discussion, we settled on a map of LA with the conference center pointed out -- the best way to communicate the value of our products.
We went through some tribulations in getting it out -- and it did turn out to be a pretty big time sink -- but Steve's report from the first day of the PDC made it all worth it:
The full MapPoint carpet was uncovered today, and as I suspected yesterday, it looked great!A number of attendees were seen using it as a paper map – standing on it pointing with their toes while planning where to meet or where a restaurant was. A new game was invented as well – Spatial Twister. “Left Foot Figeroa st.”. “Right hand 45th”.
Here's a large mockup of the carpet square (131k), as well as some action photos:
Theoretically the conference people are going to take up the carpet and send it back to us on a truck once the PDC is over. I'm looking forward to seeing it in person!