Each year, Red Hat Summit provides a forum to discuss open source technology and exchange ideas freely, so it’s especially fitting that this year, the theme at Summit revolved around Ideas Worth Exploring. Our team developed a fresh visual identity for this theme, using planetary orbits to evoke the gravity that strong ideas naturally generate.

With nearly all of the Summit spaces at the Moscone Center in San Francisco draped in this year’s theme, we needed to employ a different approach when designing the look of the Red Hat booth that would be sitting in the Ecosystem Expo.

Because it was important for visitors to be able to identify the Red Hat booth, we decided to use more of our standard corporate look and feel and stay away from the Summit branding—this helped ensure that the booth wouldn’t blend into the other signage on site.

The Red Hat booth space was massive, with a large overhead banner and 5 smaller cylinder banners above the 5 topic-based conversation tables. 3 additional spaces rounded out the area: Support Central, which provided answers for attendees’ support-related questions; Swag Central, which offered apparel and other cool Red Hat items; and Red Hat Industry Solutions, an area dedicated to highlighting solutions in 3 major customer verticals.

Thankfully, the approach we chose allowed us to create a space that could ground and center the visitor with familiar Red Hat branding without disappearing into this year’s event branding, even in the middle of a convention space filled with such a vibrant and inspiring overall theme. I had a great time working on the booth through several rounds of revisions and finally seeing it through to completion -- and it was really rewarding to see the final product!