How To Make Great Business Banners for a Conference

In an earlier blog, Andy mentioned that we will be headed to SMB Nation's Spring 2010 Conference. This conference begins tomorrow and ends Sunday. Excited to go, we've brainstormed a few ways to spruce up our booth. For one, we'll demo HD voice versus standard definition call quality. We'll also demo our unified communications platform my.OnSIP. And, we'll raffle off Polycom phones to three lucky winners. But then there was one other large detail to figure out: our banner.

We see banners everywhere, and there are so many options. On a low budget, you might choose to design a banner on Adobe Photoshop, save it to a USB drive, and drive to your local Kinkos or printer. Or, you may have searched online and found some pre-made designs for you to slap your logo on, pull out a credit card, and call it a day. But, in light of our new taste for design (homepage coming soon), we wanted more. And, we wanted them to be reusable.

So, we found a company called Displays2Go. In particular, we decided on a tall banner design that Inspector Gadget may have designed. Using a contraption at the bottom, the banner easily rolls into a bag that can be slung over your shoulder; it looks like a bag for a two person tent. The website contained detailed design specs, which you can check out here. The process is simple:

1. You submit designs to their FTP location (You can use a free client like Filezilla to submit to the FTP).
2. The design team either approves or sends you change requests.
3. After Displays2Go has approved your designs, they will send you physical proofs that are the size of a piece of paper
4. You send an approval email to Displays2Go
5. You receive your snazzy banners in the mail.

So then, the next question: Who could design these banners to look as great as our new website will look. And, who can do it quick? We decided on a designer we met on CrowdSPRING. CrowdSPRING is a crowd-sourcing solution for designing. Whether you want a design for a website, clothing, magazine ad, or business card, simply enter a project into CrowdSPRING for designers all over the world to submit. It's like having a global design team.

If you want a banner design, navigate to CrowdSPRING and click "Post Project." Click to start a "Print Design" project. You must define your price, your timing, and details about the project. If you chose Displays2Go, be sure to put a link to the design specifications into your project description. And, once you have chosen a design, before you "accept" and wrap up the project, be sure to submit the designs to the Displays2Go FTP and get them approved. If there are any design issues (e.g. bleed), you'll need the designer to tweak the files before you pay him/her.

The picture I have included in this blog post is taken on an iPhone. We like the banners so much that we leave them up in our New Jersey office, which sometimes causes random people to stare into our doorway. I'm not sure what we'll do about that. Let me know if you have any suggestions.