Twice annually, the American Chemical Society (ACS) launches a National Meeting & Exposition to feature thousands of presentations on new discoveries in science.
Spring 2019’s theme, “Chemistry for New Frontiers,” explores topics in food and nutrition, medicine, health, energy, the environment, and other fields where chemistry plays a central role.
National Meetings use TVs to display electronic signage, or digital signage, to provide more on-site event information in addition to the printed signage. Challenges of the digital signage include designing for aspect ratios of multiple displays, creating a seamless look between signs (including this year, which places two random signs side-by-side), and keeping text clear and readable from a far distance.
Digital Designer
Courtney Lopes
CSG Creative
The ACS Spring 2019 National Meeting & Expo core identity further targets general, student, and exhibitor segments. Each segment designates an accent color, color burst, and photo(s).
Originally, each of these graphic assets existed as a flat, non-editable JPEG. As a result, I couldn’t freely edit them to swap photos, resize pieces, or rotate—a requirement to adapt these graphics to a variety of sizes.
To tackle this problem, I tracked down the original images and used non-destructive Photoshop editing to mask the photos. To make my InDesign file faster, I stored the PSD master files and linked to high-res transparent PNGs (saving about 20 MB per photo in file size).