You booked your floor. Here's what your designer needs from you.

The space contract is signed, the confirmation email has a hall and a stand number in it, and for a moment it feels like the hard part is done. Then comes the question nobody warns first-time exhibitors about: now what?

Now you find the people who will design and build your stand. And the very first thing they will ask you for is a brief. The quality of that brief decides more than most exhibitors realize: a designer working from a two-line email (“we have 60 sqm at the show, make it look great, here’s our logo”) has no choice but to guess — and every guess that lands wrong costs a revision round, a week of calendar, and sometimes a redesign after the venue rejects something the designer couldn’t have known about.

The good news: a proper design brief is not a design document. You don’t need to know what the stand should look like — that’s the designer’s job. You need to answer the questions only you can answer, and hand over the files only you have. Here they are.

The questions to answer before the first call

Why are you exhibiting? Leads, a product launch, scheduled meetings with existing clients, pure brand visibility — each pulls the design in a different direction. A stand built for walk-in traffic looks nothing like a stand built for six pre-booked meetings an hour. Pick your top one or two; “all of the above” designs all of them badly.

What must the stand do? Not look like — do. Walk through a visitor’s five minutes: reception counter or open entry? Product display — which products, how many? Demo stations with screens? A closed meeting room, or open seating? Storage for coats, boxes and backup stock (you will need more than you think — see our exhibitor-day piece)? A bar or coffee point?

How many people? Staff on the stand, meetings running at the same time, visitors you expect at peak. This sets the real space budget inside your square meters — seating for eight eats a surprising share of 60 sqm.

What are you showing? For every physical exhibit: dimensions, weight, and what it needs — power, water, network, ventilation. A machine that arrives on a pallet changes the floor, the entry, and sometimes the whole layout.

What’s the budget? Tell your designer the real range. A design you can’t afford to build isn’t a design — it’s a delay. Budget transparency doesn’t make the design cheaper; it makes it buildable on the first pass.

One show or a series? If the stand should live again at other shows — or scale from 60 sqm to 100 — say so now. Designing for reuse changes material and construction choices from day one.

The files to attach

• Floor plan with your plot marked — plus stand number, hall, and which sides are open to aisles. Orientation drives the whole layout.
• Venue and show name — so the designer (or their contractor) can pull the technical regulations: height limits, rigging rules, fire-rated material requirements. If the organiser sent you a technical manual, forward it whole.
• Brand guidelines — the actual brand book, not a description of it.
• Logo in vector format (AI, EPS or PDF) — a logo saved from your website prints badly at three meters wide.
• Product photos and spec sheets for everything on display.
• Photos of your previous stands — with one honest line on what worked and what didn’t. This is the fastest brief there is.
• Campaign visuals for the show, if marketing has them — the stand and the campaign should speak the same language.

The takeaway

A complete brief doesn’t limit your designer — it aims them. Every question answered above is a revision round you won’t pay for later, and every file attached is a week the design isn’t waiting on “just one more thing.” Book the floor, write the brief, then let the designers do what they’re good at: giving your ideas their shape.

We adapt designs and build stands for exhibitors and agencies across Europe — and a buildability check of your design is something we do before you commit — peoplecanbuild.com