Eric Kanagy of the RedPost Inc. recently posted my sign Designs at the Bently Reserve, and I wanted to explain them a bit more to the world.
I’ll go more in detail in posts soon about the technical installation and management I oversaw with a fantastic crew at the Bently Reserve, but one thing that posed a more unique problem was a means of guiding potential customers to Conference locations without the traditional confusion of location memorization and without the waste of material.
Each room was given a name of a sunken ship beneath the foundation of the Bently Reserve in the 19th century (idea courtesy of Mark Mayfield, Chief Engineer to the Bently Reserve), with the remaining rooms deck terminology. Although it’s fairly easy to find the name of each room on a map or asking one of our staff, it seemed redundant to have to force people to memorize a spot with all the other experiences of a hurried conference. I also didn’t want a digital ‘mall’ experience with an interactive or stationary map at the front entrances- to me, it’s just another thing to have to find.
I can remember quite a few events where I struggled to find ‘Room 220E, around the corner, past the bathroom, you’ll see a easel out front…’, and assumed, wouldn’t it be easier to put the name of the room as the occupied company or group? Well, for the non-tech, that would require production of signage, even if they’re cheap prints- waste of ink/toner, paper, board material, time to print and cut, time to manage- there had to be a way of managing event signage digitally in a way that’s productive, green, and cost effective.
I sat out searching for ‘photo signs’, but most came up short with the typical kodak home based sign: cheap frame, USB loaded or Wifi loaded on proprietary software. After a bit of a run, I found the RedPost offered a unique sign based system with customized, open source, software that would allow remote management. Perfect, I thought, I want six now, and emailed the company… but unfortunately in the summer of 2007, they weren’t in production yet.
Months went by, I had my Graphic Designers and IT leads contact the company without success, and finally I called straight to the owner over a month to the end of the project, let him know exactly what it was for, and we were off purchasing, installing, and demoing cutting edge signs for the world to enjoy.
The end result is a beautiful, high tech fixture of the Bently Reserve Conference Center: customized by Eric Kanagy and his RedPost team by installing it on the spot with our support staff. I designed an animated fixture for each room name that showcases a personalized scene of the beautiful sunset through night time fog of San Francisco (yes, that’s photoshop and fake)- it’s running the javascript engine mootools as a slideshow in real time of graphics that I’ve created. I’ve scripted an engine on my Mac so that future images will be easily adjusted and updated in realtime to our servers for loading, allowing prompt and user friendly name changes as requested (logo changes as well).
Thanks to RedPost and Eric Kanagy for showcasing my beautiful art, Chris and Amber’s beautiful building, and supporting our staff as we managed the final pieces of the brand new Bently Reserve Conference Center. More to come soon on this beautiful, high tech buildout…