Guts Agency | Bold exhibition design for HP

Visual storytelling at the Olympics of print

Drupa. The Olympics of print. Every four years, corporations convene in Düsseldorf to show off the latest in print innovations, competing for the attention of half a million attendees.

For Drupa 2024, HP had a complex story to tell: how their advanced production lines, with innovative print technology, help businesses “unlock profitable growth.”

With Guts, HP was able to visually tell such a complex story in a way that’s inspiring, makes sense, and allowed them to stand out at an event of giants.

Exhibition design

The project in one word? Enormous. We brought HP’s entire 4500m² exhibition to life – name tags, signs, totems, video clips, and the pièce de résistance: 100 walls, some as big as 18x4m.

We divided these walls into groups based on HP departments or print technologies, each group with its own graphical themes and mini story that support HP’s wider narrative of “unlock profitable growth.”

We focused on striking the balance between wowing visuals, and understandability – trying not overwhelm the eye – so attendees could easily connect individual walls to their mini story, and each mini story to the wider narrative.

Small and colorful Slice’s illustrations

Visual language

To crack the main narrative, we started by designing the “hero wall,” inspired by what we call “the big bang of tech.”

It all starts from black – a bold choice at Drupa, where white dominates. Black is the color of the inner workings of technology, the under-the-hood. A white beam shoots forth, representing innovative production lines, passing through HP’s five technological worlds that together “unlock profitable growth.”

These five worlds are comprised of neon elements. For example, elements from coding and UI represent HP’s world of big data and automation. Elements of machinery and gears show HP’s digital print engine world. And to highlight the company’s vast mix-and-matchable solutions world, we brought endless combos of textures, finishes, and forms.

To tell many stories in a unified way, we produced a system of blocks used to contain each element. The blocks fit together in harmony so that the various elements of our story work together, like the structure of parts inside a machine.

This structure gave us the freedom to be creative without losing the thread.

Animations

Production lines are dynamic and alive. So we created an animated language that behaves at the pace of machines, including technological flashes and micro-animations for each HP world.

Making of

This 6 month long-haul was so worth it. We brought pencil to paper for countless sketches, workshopped creative concepts with the client, and communicated and worked with various HP departments to crack the story. The result was a collaborative effort that brought each HP technological world to life.