The Last Stand: Orange Business Services, 2020

Back in 2020, before the word "physical" needed to be attached to the word "event" to mean anything, we designed an exhibition stand for Orange Business Services. It was built for the Orange Expert zone, a dedicated area within a wider stand designed to put the company's specialists front and centre rather than hide them behind a product wall.

The brief was straightforward in the way exhibition briefs often are and difficult in the way exhibition builds always are. Orange needed a space where visitors could speak directly to technical experts, in an environment calm enough for a real conversation but still visually strong enough to pull people in off a busy show floor. Clean structural lines, a controlled colour palette, and clear sightlines into meeting pods rather than open booths.

We designed the stand around a series of framed zones rather than one continuous open plan, using structural panelling and consistent signage to separate the expert areas from general circulation without walling anyone off. Materials stayed restrained: matte finishes, a tight palette built around Orange's own brand colour, and lighting used to signal which zone a visitor had entered rather than to decorate the space for its own sake.

What we didn't know at the time was how significant the date would turn out to be. Within weeks of the show, the entire industry of physical exhibitions and global gatherings came to a stop, and it stayed stopped for a long time. This stand was one of the last full scale physical exhibition builds we completed before that shift, designed and delivered in a world that assumed people would keep flying to conference centres indefinitely.

Looking back at it now, what holds up is the structure of the thinking, not nostalgia. The zoning approach, the idea of designing calm conversation spaces inside a loud exhibition hall, and the discipline of a tight material palette are all things we still apply to stand design today. The context around exhibitions has changed a great deal since 2020. The fundamentals of what makes a stand actually work for the people standing in it haven't.

You can see more of our exhibition and events work, spanning stands built both before and after that shift, on our events and exhibitions page.