Melony Rocque-Hewitt looks at Icon’s branding production and overlay solutions for the UN Conference on Climate Change.
Over here we’re all slightly jealous of Icon, the southeast London-based global event-branding group. The reason? Well, while the rest of us have been psychologically damaged by months of freezing temperatures, biblical rains, alleviated by the odd week of raging artic blizzards, members of the Icon team were packed off to Doha in the Middle East for three months to help oversee the branding production and overlay solution for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change.
The Doha office of the global creative communications group WRG, which was responsible for designing the look and feel of the conference, called on Icon to provide all interior branding, internal and external wayfinding and exterior venue dressing for this major international political event.
The conference was held at the Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC) and here Icon dressed both the interior and exterior of the venue as well as the surrounding car parks and approach roads.
While the project was a high profile one, behind the scenes, limited time and resources were the order of the day.
"We had less than six weeks from our initial briefing until the conference opened,”said Dave Weller, client services and international business director at Icon. “After two weeks for scoping we had a similar amount of time to prepare over 5,000 pieces of artwork and manage the production of all the necessary elements for this important, global event,” he added.
"We were delighted with the overall look of the conference," commented Jilly Dungay of WRG. "There is no doubt that Icon's knowledge, experience and professionalism enabled them to cope with the tight time scales and cumbersome decision making processes that were encountered on this project."
The project was delivered through Icon’s Qatar offices in conjunction with Icon:Prolab, the company’s UAE-based joint venture operation that supplies wide-format digital print and event branding for many projects in the Gulf.
“The digital print element was instrumental to the whole branding experience,”says Aidan McNeil, account manager for Icon. “The designs that had to be printed involved intricate colours and layouts, the digital printing really did it justice.”
Conference branding involved the creation of a number of striking features. In all the conference included 350 hanging structures that were located in the reception areas as well as eight giant hanging banners suspended from the ceiling, which were found in the foyer. All these banners were produced from matt banner material and were printed directly with latex inks output from an HP LX850 wide-format printer. Finishing involved the creation of eyelets at the top of each structure, and tunnel hems at the base for the insertion of poles to weight the structures properly, and ensure that they hung correctly. As these items were situated inside the conference centre, they didn’t require any lamination.
Also internally, backdrops and pavilion walls were digitally printed to banner material with UV inks, but due to the drop height of these elements, sections had to be stitched together as the UV wide-format printer used for this job could print to a maximum of 3.1m.
Similar matt banner material was used to produce 1.2m of banners, which were attached to wooden hoardings that stood at 2.4m high and situated outside the venue. At 260g, the banner material was heavier than those used for the reception and foyer areas. UV inkjet technology was employed to print onto the material that was then attached to the wooden hoardings.
As these banners were outside, they were also further laminated to protect them from the light, heat and dust.
500 internal directional and room signs were also needed for the conference. Here, latex inks were printed onto self-adhesive vinyl, placed onto foam board, cut and placed accordingly.
With sustainability being a key subject of the conference, Icon made sure that the signage was as environmentally friendly as possible, within budgetary constraints.
At the end of the conference, all the banner material was collected and given to the client for recycling and repurposing.
As a separate project, the company also worked on both the UN Secretary General and the GCC Pavilions. Here, Icon creatively used a plastic frame, which was screwed to the end of the walls and covered with UV digitally printed fabric to brand the walls in a continuous design.
Walls here stood at 4m high, so once again, as the UV printer could only cope with a maximum drop of 3.1m, additional panels were stitched onto the larger ones.
In addition, Icon erected four 5m x 3m messaging walls which featured hundreds of people's faces interspersed with mirror squares to reflect the faces of those attending the pavilion. The design was given to us with the images of the faces. Here, a digitally printed Foamex substrate was used. Some squares were cut out and replaced with cut mirrors, so that delegates would see reflections of themselves.
While the conference was a major success in terms of its look, an element that is on the increase at large events is the inclusion of social media, which was certainly true of this event.
“I have been at Icon for four-and-a-half years now and in that time I have witnessed the upsurge in event interconnectivity and real-time communication. Things like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or giant screens with live messaging and rolling data have become central to the audience and delegate experience,”says McNeil.
“However, although it might appear that this would be detrimental to wide-format digital print, this is not the case. Wide-format is a fantastic way of creating ambience and setting the scene for other activities to take place. Advances in printer technology and the type of substrates that you can now print to, make wide-format print very relevant and very necessary.
“I work on a number of golf accounts in the UK and I’m being asked a lot by my clients about new ways in which information can be displayed in print. Print is very relevant and ties into the whole mix in increasingly new and interesting ways.”