The Big Bang Fair, organised by Engineering UK, is the largest event which celebrates science, technology, engineering and maths for young people. It offers a hands-on approach to show the audience just how exciting and rewarding job opportunities are within the industry, and to encourage young people to peruse a career in this field.

At Ocean we are asked to produce all the promotional material for the Big Bang Fair, such as newspaper adverts, show guides, lanyards and  exhibitions stands.  Our brief is to design an engaging and exciting look and feel that encapsulates the Big Bang brand and that appeals to all audiences of young people (7–19 year old girls and boys), teachers, parents and sponsors. The design concept must also be flexible enough to be used as part of the ‘year round conversation’ of smaller UK events.

Each year we try to come up with a new concept that will appeal to the target market. We keep up-to-date with social media and look out for what the “in thing” is for the current period. In 2013 we took our inspiration from the social media of Instagram in order to create a vibrant and engaging concept that would appeal to the target market. We used some of the less used colours within the brand identity to make it stand-out from previous years’ designs. Image brightness, contrast and colour saturation levels were used for dramatic effect to make the event marketing look inspirational, energetic, lively and vibrant. Additional graphics in the form of distressed borders added an extra dimension and were used in isolation for way finding graphics and stage set back drops.

The instagram design, colours and extra graphics worked so well throughout the exhibitions, that we decided that this year we would stick with the same energetic feel, but instead of focusing on how we manipulated the images, we focussed more on the background and Graphics and how these could be used to promote the Fair. We created a concept, which we like to call “splash attack”, based on the idea of graffiti which is a very popular art form at the moment. We created a brick-background made up of the Big Bang brand colours, and large brick exhibitions stands were produced where teachers and students could write some interesting facts onto a post-it note which they could then stick on the wall. It was a great way of getting people engaged and involved.