George P. Johnson

Company: GPJ
Roll: Production Designer
Program/Tools: Adobe Suite, Pre-Press, Installation

Hustle

Some people hear “production” and they thing motion graphics or a movie set. My experience in production beaches the walls of Experience Design in the Trade-show Industry, and ties my experience with fabrication into design.

During my two and half years at GPJ, I had the pleasure of working with some of the top companies in tech, finance and luxury vehicles as a production designer. Understanding how these brands were built (from a design perspective) and applying that to proper mechanical print files to help produce graphics for some of the largest trade-shows in the US. Understanding meticulous file organization, use of Pantone/brand colors, proper logo usage and placement, teamwork along with extremely fast paced work environment were the key to success in this roll.

Below are shots from some of the shows that I got to play a part in by getting mechanical files pulled together for fabrication or even lending a hand to our graphic designers when they were overloaded with work.

Behind the scenes, making files on a 12″ screen to then see these graphic on 50′ walls was an extremely gratifying experience.

IBM at Gartner – Lead Production Designer

Gartner was a smaller show, and IBM held two booth spaces and a hallway at this event.

IBM THINK – San Francisco

With a 48-hour window for GPJ to set up more than 500,000 square feet of exhibit space in Moscone Center’s North and South halls, to say teamwork and meticulous file creation was important would be an understatement.

American Express at AFP

One of our smaller trade shows (in the grand scheme of things), AMEX had one booth space to fill with their two large structures and some other fun photo op set-ups and seating. Production for this show was anything from cut vinyl and simple one-sided board prints to the large 20′ tall fabric walls.

Facebook at Blackhat – Lead Production Designer

Most people hear Facebook and don’t think of anything small. Well, in this case, Facebook made an appearance with a pretty basic 10′ X 10′ booth just to have the name and brand be present in the show.

IBM Power 9 – Lead Production Designer

IBM Power9 was a small exclusive event held in various small venues across the US and in a handful of other countries. The Power9 event was intended to flaunt IBM’s newest chip processor (seen on a pedestal in one of the images below). The difference in this event is that they really leveraged Virtual Reality triggers and gave the attendees a truly unique experience. I was also able to help this show move along by re-creating a vector version of the processor chip in Illustrator, so each of those little dots and lines were all done by digital hand.