NeoCON Showroom

Herman Miller asked Mauk Design to create a showroom for their new BE collection of personal office accessories. The challenge was to ensure architects and designers would notice these small accessories, and understand their stories. Sheer white fabric walls were rear illuminated to contrast with the rectilinear forms used in most furniture systems. 

One of the main displays of the exhibit are the C2 Personal Climate Control units, which are placed in front of a thermochromic film that visually shows the temperature changes by the products. After the show, most of the showroom was reused in other showrooms.

Thanks to Exhibitor Magazine for the honor of a “Exhibitor Legend-Lifetime Achievement Award”. I’m looking forward to more collaborations in the future.

Heidelberg Engineering asked Mauk Design to capture the attention of neurologists from all over the show floor by gathering inspiration from the primary subject of their corporate research, the human eye.  To contrast with the majority of white healthcare exhibits, black is used as a background for the bright color projections.

Heidelberg Engineering is a company based in Germany that makes optical products to track the development of Multiple Sclerosis. The exhibit includes eight floating lenses made of inflated vinyl. Six projectors focus on the lenses to create moving images that reveal disease progression on the back of the retina. Glowing frosted plexiglass fences guard the product displays while grounding the rest of the booth. The lenses are constructed with an extruded aluminum frame which holds three disparate layers of materials; vinyl, rear projection material, and another layer of vinyl.

The exhibit effectively communicated the core messaging in a unique and visually impactful way, which helped to nearly double the prior year’s number of leads.

Agam is a manufacturing company that specializes in creating standard and custom exhibits with interlocking extrusions and components. With the Agam’s systems, designers and builders can define space, create forms, and achieve persuasive structures by combining extrusions, accessories, and panels.

Using Agam’s fabrications components, Mauk designed an exhibit for the Exhibitors Live show in Los Vegas. Above the exhibit, the company name was displayed in big letters in order to be seen from across the show floor. In the exhibit, the words “Bold”, “Easy”, and “Fast” stood in gigantic letters to showcase Agam's systems. A large exclamation point with removable custom extrusions was placed in the center of the exhibits for visitors to interact with. In addition, a series a people silhouettes made out of Agam's custom extrusions show the relation between Agam’s and its customers.

Chang You is a leading online game developer and operator in China. They wanted to have a dramatic introduction to the E3 video game show, and invited Mauk design to conceptualize the space. The exhibit created a cool hangout space lined with high end bean bag chairs, dramatic lighting, and a glistening cloud overhead. The space served a beacon to attendees from across the hall.

Retail Shop

Mauk Design has a history of branding many companies from their origination, but the 101 Surfsports Shop in San Rafael presented an opportunity to design all aspects of the store, from logo, to interior, to vehicles. 

Taking an environmentally friendly stance for a store that is all about enjoying nature through water sports, the use of cardboard tubes became a metaphor for the ocean. A wall of circles with different diameters represents bubbles, and walls of long horizontal tubes to support boards that symbolize waves. The store is designed to show off the bold colors of the products, keeping to a gray scale scheme for everything except the cardboard tubes, which are painted in four bold colors across the store.

101 Surfsports’ logo is a simplified version of the highway sign that leads customers from the store to the best surf spots of Northern California. The top of the logo forms a scene of waves.

Doha, Qatar

Mauk Design worked with HOK in San Francisco on a major environmental graphics project for the Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar. The signage design program finds inspiration in the architectural detailing, creating an elegant and timeless solution for the soon-to-be international travel hub. 

Consisting of 4,000 signs, the system included sign typologies, kiosks of all forms, flight information display systems, baggage information display systems, terminal wing signs, and information desks. The sign design direction was drawn from the airfoil shape of an airplane wing, and the stainless steel triangular pattern echoed that of the ceiling treatment throughout the terminal. Check-in kiosks echoed the horns of Qatar’s indigenous oryx, which is found in the Qatar Airways logo.

Cape Town Exhibition

Celebrating 50 years of peaceful space exploration at the 62nd International Astronomical Congress in Capetown, the NASA theater revealed specific glimpses into the extraordinary accomplishments of space flight. 

Two major voids sliced through the white NASA cubes and were filled with large space images. The general form was inspired by the standard aerospace buildings, which are where these space crafts are created. Graphics emphasized the scale of discovery, and cut-outs featured NASA’s greatest hits: Mars Rover, Hubble Telescope, Saturn, International Space Station and more. Space mission posters were displayed inside, and a massive close-up of the moon on the outside wall called attention to an actual moon rock sample.

100 posters displayed at opening party for the San Francisco Design Week.

Sunnyvale

Mobile World Conference - Barcelona

Visa International asked Mauk Design to design their exhibit experience for the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona.  Mobile phone commerce is the centerpiece of Visa’s new commerce direction, and the exhibit had to tell that story.

Overhead an interlocking web of LED’s traced back and forth, portraying the fully integrated aspects of Visa’s offerings.  On the ground floor a metaphorical flower stand, and car provided a backdrop for actual demos.  A theater allowed more in depth briefing of Visa’s mobile platform.  The top floor included a cafe, seating areas and three conference rooms.

Branding for a software company. Utilizes a colorful, human logo that exemplifies inclusion.

Pop-Up Milk Bar

Clover dairy of Sonoma county wanted to bring the freshness of their organic products to the consumers of San Francisco. In this popup store, milk is splashed across the front glass, and a hand painted sign recalls dairy signage of old. Inside the beautiful vistas of Clover’s milk cows in Sonoma county act as a backdrop for tasting nonfat, 1%, whole milk, cheese, and yogurt products in a wine tasting type atmosphere.

Exhibition for SHRM

Running Man Exhibit

Siggraph is all about speed and performance, and Intel needed a highly visible presence in this highly visual event. One of the team’s first tasks was to do away with ‘the neutral image Intel had presented in the past,’ Mauk says, ‘instead, speed became a marketing objective.’ 

The ten 20-foot high ‘polygon people,’ five male and five female, shown accelerating around the exhibit were based on studies by Eadweard Muybridge, who is known as the pioneer in using photography to study motion. 

AIA Show

For a small display with the AIA in Denver, red fabric banners hung like tapering pyramids. Underneath these, red boxes displayed individual tile collections and helped to frame a video screen presentation area. Because tiles are very small objects by themselves, Mauk Design realized the importance of focusing the attendee’s attention to each tile.  The formal architectural language of the exhibit was inspired by dramatic Roman architecture, and the use of bright red embodies the color of Italy.

Sugar Bowl Bakery is a large commercial bakery that bakes the highest quality sweet baked goods sold at retailers nationwide.

The challenge was to create an exhibit space that created appetite appeal for the product, showcase their brand, and was easy to set up.

Their previous exhibit had a large number of parts, intricate assembly instructions and required skilled setup personal. Setup frequently continued into a second day. This design allows the client to roll the exhibit in place, unfold it, install the fabric graphics and plug in. The client set it up in one half hour.

The exhibits graphics enlarge the small products, while packaged products on the shelf display are exceptionally well illuminated. Sugar Bowl Bakery’s unique color palette comes to life in a rear printed vinyl floor.

Worldwide Conference

As Mauk Design’s largest project yet, the McDonald’s World Wide Convention brought on a major opportunity to assist with multiple aspects of the franchisee show. Beginning with the 750.000 sq.ft. floor plan layout, the designers were also responsible for all the common areas, including the branding of two main lobbies, eating areas, a large center stage, meeting places and bus signs, along with many large corporate exhibits.

After the firm’s success at the biennial World Wide Convention in 2012, Mauk Design was asked to return to design seven of the major corporate exhibits at the show, along with many of the public spaces. Drawing from the client’s specific needs for each space, all areas had a personality of their own that worked to communicate key points in a visual manner. Mauk Design was also enlisted to lay out the master floor plan of the exhibit area, concentrating on experience and flow through the 500,000 sqft space.

The Place and Promotion exhibit is comprised of five distinct areas that function together to tell a story. A layered cut-out letter wall reveals glimpses of the booths’ contents to attendees, while dramatic walls divide the rest of the spaces inside. 

Areas include an entrance theatre with a sound and light show, Areas of the World studios for selection of new restaurant designs designated by region, a retail experience quiz game, an area to promote digital use of modern social networking media, and the family experience area to familiarize franchisees with all McDonald’s has to offer families and children.

Designed for a company that discovers, develops and delivers innovative human therapeutics, this exhibit was intended to educate health care professionals on the roles of specific receptors in chronic disease. As a disease state exhibit, its purpose was to communicate the process of the disease for educational purposes. Attendees entered into a clinical looking cube, and were transported into an infinite body occupied by floating cells, molecules and receptors. This provided an experience of entering the human body to view the ongoing cellular processes that characterize the disease. Inspired by state of the art science museums, the cube shape utilized every square inch of the 400 square-foot space.

NBAA Exhibit

In an effort to design an exhibit that would stand out amongst multi-million dollar jets while also emphasizing the people of Duncan Aviation, Mauk Design rose to the challenge and created something dramatically different than the rest of the show.

Aircraft service is by and large a function of many hours of work by highly skilled employees. The third Duncan Aviation exhibit by Mauk Design sits under a dramatic canopyof 5” x 7” portraits, each a different photograph of Duncan’s 2,200 employees. This reflects the values of Duncan, putting the people who work on the aircraft front and center. A glass and stainless sculpture in the middle of the exhibit drew attention to the logo, which has become instantly identifiable in their industry.

The main desk was crafted by Duncan’s cabinet shop and speaks to their level of fabrication excellence used in the jet interiors. The wall standing behind the desk uses a pattern from the actual map of aircraft flight corridors over the US. 

The challenge for the Italian Trade Commission Marble Center was to attract the attention of architects, ensuring that they would fall in love with the material. Attention was focused on the marble by laying out 80 distinct samples in the shape of a nautilus shell, following the Fibonacci spiral. Samples floated on a nearly-invisible steel frame that rose slowly from knee level to eye-level.

The spiral path led architects to the center of the spiral, stopping to gaze at the beautiful marbles and then retraced their steps back out, reinforcing the experience. Because the marble was treated in a jewel-like manner, the 30’ x 40’ exhibit weighed less than 2,500 pounds.

Car Show Exhibit

Our idea was to go beyond kicking the tires by adding another level of fun and intelligence to the exhibit without adding more dollars. The exhibit used low tech interactive displays, simple video, clean shapes and straight forward finishes to accomplish an elegant yet fun experience.

The exhibit reused a great deal of existing material, emphasized the engineering quality of the German company, while also keeping the cost low. Using a more restrained color palette for the exhibit allowed the color of the cars to shine.

To highlight the variety of car color options, bowling balls were painted and mounted on bearings which allowed them to be spun. These hung above the selection of fabrics, where attendees were invited to slide fabric samples along the rail to match the exterior paint colors. A wall covered in personalized rear-view mirrors brings humor to the show floor. Lifestyle hardware filled the exhibit with hopes to appeal to a youth market, a key example being the displays of factory wheels which sit on blue skateboard wheels.

Reynolds

Reynolds Composites manufactures carbon fiber bicycle wheels, tubing, and bike components. To stand out at the Interbike show, Mauk design made an exhibit that was as simple as possible. To save money, the client built the back wall frame out of leftover carbon fiber tubing. One person could lift this 38’ x 16’ wall.

Wheel sets were the only products being exhibited, bringing an element of motion as they all rotated on their displays. The result was a space that spoke to the soul of a bicyclist, bringing a certain amount of poetry to a macho product. 

“A clear powerful statement of our product and its application that changed the perception of Reynold’s Cycling in the eyes of our competitors, our customers and even our employees forever. Mauk’s vision is genius.”

Cort Larned

CEO, Reynold Composites

Rock Shox

In the exhibit for Interbike, the product is placed in a metaphorical mountain valley, where bike fork shocks run over rocks (mounted on a conveyer belt) using real motion to attract the crowds. Elsewhere, transparent bikes were used so that the forks and seatposts would be simply but clearly emphasized. Each of the four corner pyramids holds conference spaces and storage for the booth.

For the 2012 American Society of Anesthesiologists Convention in Washington, D.C., Mauk Design created an evanescent environment to reflect the light aspect of Masimo’s technology.

Instead of standard invasive blood sample testing, the noninvasive pulse oximeter uses LED light and algorithms to measure blood oxygen content, hemoglobin, and carbon monoxide levels. Mauk Design constructed a space of light using fins of a unique 3M Optical Film which distributes and magnifies light. The reflective yet see-through quality of the material gives it a physical presence, while defining an ethereal space.

To prevent the color touch screens from washing out, long white display cases were incorporated to focus attention on the products while simultaneously cutting ambient light.

NBAA Exhibit

Corporate jets are precious objects in many senses: what they carry is valuable, and they are complex and costly to service and operate. Employees at Duncan Aviation are specialists in maintaining business aircraft, work that must be done skillfully by very rigid deadlines. 

As a company that has worked with Mauk Design from the very beginning 25 years ago, Duncan Aviation has provided the design team opportunities to create exhibits, branding, collateral and packaging. Mauk’s success with Duncan is very much about making simple ideas work: ideas like confidence, people skills, and time management. The depth of understanding between client and designer has made it possible to express these ideas in a highly original formal language, one which communicates well in it’s context.

The first exhibit done by Mauk Design for Duncan Aviation contained a photo gallery of hand-tinted black and white photographs of Duncan employees. Each employee signed the dominating black airfoil pylon, which created a sense of verticality in the exhibit. 

As the second exhibit designed by Mauk Design, it became very important that the booth highlighted the talents of the staff and their expertise in time management. The design consisted of an entrance portal, shaped like a vertical aerofoil, and a conference enclosure behind. 

The entrance portal was covered in portrait photographs of every Duncan employee, and the conference enclosure with a series of clocks. The employee portraits were a great success. For the first time some aircraft owners and managers could see who their Duncan contact was, which succeeded in making the company human to its clients.

Exhibition for SHRM

A company known for their employee recognition programs, O.C. Tanner needed an exhibit that would simply delight. 

The entire booth was a series of moving icons that rocked back and forth, spun, popped up and down, and rotated. This movement was a metaphor for the way a well motivated workforce works together. During the presentation, the speaker described what happens if your employees are not motivated, throwing a large blade switch (think Frankenstein creation), causing the entire moving exhibit to stop dead.  Over the course of the few days of exhibiting, the company collected 2,200 leads, which was a 37-percent jump from previous counts.

“I have had so many positive comments about the design since we unveiled our new brand in Chicago. When I traveled to other Human Resource shows this fall I heard fond remembrances of those HR folks who were in Chicago and came to our booth. They consistently said it was a remarkable design. So Mitchell you havea lot to be proud of with your design efforts.”

Cordell Clinger

Convention Manager

O.C.Tanner

Milan Furniture Fair

The Humanitype exhibit debuted at the iSaloni Milan Furniture Fair in Milan, Italy. The collection of room dividers was used to divide temporary workgroup space. For the 5m x 6m exhibit, the product was simply stacked to create a lattice-like back wall. Made of freestanding, structural elements, the exhibit structure used neodymium magnets to lock together. Each screen element was manufactured out of a single sheet of polypropylene, the material milk jugs are made of. The entire exhibit shipped in a small single crate.

D-Wave systems is creating a new form of super computers called quantum computing. It is several orders of magnitude faster than current computer technology, and the market is mostly government agencies. To find an elegant solution for client D-Wave Systems, Mauk Design began by distilling the contents down to a prototype board allowed for a clean space, while also emphasizing the product that makes D-Wave unique.

        All surfaces were covered in LED lights, which caught the eye of show attendees. A plex tube treats the CPU prototype as a jewel, highlighting its value to the company. The snap together floor picked up the visual grid of the chip architecture and the lights. 

Optovue technologies provide optical clinicians with information so new, they demand a different approach to treatment decision algorithms. Optovue invited Mauk Design to convey to communicate their advantages of their Avanti system, a Premier System and Platform for Future Technology Enhancements. The exhibit used simple drapes, modular display pedestals,  and lighting to create a warm, personal space to learn about Optovue’s products. 

E3 Exhibits

The faceted design of this Playstation exhibit is based on Japanese origami and robots. The triangular fabric planes interconnect with the inflated spherical theatre, which was the first of its kind to be used in an exhibit. It had an inner balloon of rear projection screen, and a clear vinyl outer balloon. Inside were five massive rear projectors cooled by liquid nitrogen.

The challenge of the AT&T Exhibit was to create a functional and flexible system to last a minimum of five years in the constantly evolving field of technology. Without appearing modular, the design had to work well in multiple configurations while successfully adapting to upcoming products and future uses.

The main focus became the “Super Kiosk” which could be arranged to be used as a demo station, a presentation area or a video wall. Both the client and design team wanted to occupy a minimal carbon footprint with the exhibit. Aspects that contribute to lowering the carbon footprint include the use of LED lighting, recycled steel, partially recycled fabric, and environmental laminate. 

All signage is video screen based which eliminates use of printed signs to be discarded after each show. Overhead space is defined by a bright “Network of Possibilities” sphere, which contains internal animated LED lights that attract attendees from across the hall.

Home of the Future

Microsoft needed an exhibition to demonstrate the wide variety of enabling technologies that contribute to home electronic integration. The simple solution was to showcase these technologies in a home.

This exhibit focuses attendees’ attention with a minimum use of resources, it communicates a straightforward message about the amazing home conveniences which lay just ahead, it enhances people’s comfort with the showcased technologies and it does this all with an approachable sense of humor.

Mauk Design was asked to design the stage for the Transbay Transit Center groundbreaking ceremony in San Francisco, CA. The event was attended by public officials, and marked the beginning of a long phase of construction on the transit center.