Creating a Multi-channel City Discovery Experience for SXSW
The story of a scrappy, multidisciplinary team that created a holistic city discovery experience.
South by Southwest rolls through Austin like a bulldozing freight train, creating a two-week wake of gridlock, Bird scooter chaos, lines of people waiting in lines, and a deluge of ideas. It’s noisy, congested, and Austinites love to complain, but the convergence of incredible technology minds, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and more, always makes for an exciting middle-two-weeks of March.
This year we decided to give Austin and SXSW attendees a glimpse into the side of our home city we here at Handsome love and the experiences here we love to share. Rather than churning out a city guide with the normal “best of/off the beaten path” lists you’d expect, we decided to do it the way we do best — we picked four of our favorite music groups in four different genres playing at the festival this year, and curated perfectly Austin experiences for them. This led us to produce a few things that decidedly weren’t your standard city guide: 1) our first in-house designed, written, and produced publication; 2) a 22’-long digital wayfinding sign we designed, built, and installed ourselves; 3) two websites supporting both our publication and our digital wayfinding sign; 4) and an over-capacity party to celebrate the release of our publication. And we did all of this in 4 weeks.
From hallway walk-and-talk spitballing to workshopping sessions to weekend power tools and late nights spent writing, editing, and margin-checking, we did it all while also spent juggling full-time commitments to client projects. The successful delivery of all of this was largely due to 2 things: having a clear, shared vision for the project goals; and using talented, multidisciplinary team and holistic approach to turning our vision into a reality.
We’ve been excited to share insights into how we accomplished one of the major projects we tackled going into SXSW — designing, sourcing, configuring, and building a digital wayfinding sign that lived on the front of our building for 10 days during the Interactive and Music festivals at SXSW. Dive in, check out some pics, and drop us a line if you’d like a copy of experience, or if you’ve had similar projects germinating in your head that you’d love to see come to life.
A Designer, Marketer, and a Technologist Build a Wayfinding Sign on the Front of Their Studio…
Design and Planning
Stephen Brown, Technologist
This was an incredibly exciting project to work on, in part because the timeline was ambitious. We had roughly two weeks to move from a mockup of a sign on the outside of the building to having something functional, structurally sound, and visually striking to look at. The geography of our office location in the context of SXSW meant hundreds of thousands of eyes would see this installation, so it was a huge opportunity to do something impressive.
Matt D, Marketing
“It would be cool to have a giant LED marquee on the front of our building, telling people about cool events around the office during SXSW.” Almost verbatim, this is the nugget our Creative Partner, Brandon, off-handedly mentioned to me after a meeting about something else entirely one day. “Yeah, that’d be cool. Let’s do it.” So Brandon mocked up a few ideas, and the tech team and I started figuring out how we could make them into reality.
Tech Sourcing
Stephen B, Technologist
Sourcing panels was the first challenge. We needed something with a reasonable density of LEDs, big enough to fit two rows of text on, programmable via WiFi, and bright enough to be seen outdoors in direct sunlight. We also needed them within a few days — which significantly limited our choices and introduced some risk if the panels wouldn’t work the way we expect them to.
Thanks to Amazon Prime, we had the panels just in a few days. We immediately started to play around with them. We quickly learned that a Google translation of Chinese within the documentation was more helpful than the English version of the provided manual. Each panel had a self-hosted wifi network with a default password attached, updatable via a mobile app or using a Windows-based application. Both applications were models of a truly disastrous (almost comical) user experience, but we made do with the tools we had available.
Ivan Alonso, Brand Designer
Two of our main considerations for the printed design of our panel were the physical space it was going to take up, and the LED panels themselves. Architecturally, we knew how much space the entire structure would take up — there’s a row of windows just to the right of our main entryway on East 6th street that has a 6” concrete ledge, which framed our panel’s overall design well. Once we got the LED panels in, we learned a few other things — typographically, we were limited to what we could do because of what Stephen and team learned about their programming. Because of this, we pivoted from our initial mocks to a new design where each of the four categories, inspired by our publication, were printed on the faceplate rather than having them displayed on the LED panels themselves.
Schematics
Stephen, Technologist
Fortunately, our Handsome family features people with a huge diversity of experience and skills. One of our Project Managers, Matty, got to showcase his carpentry background, and sketched out a design for a sturdy 3-part frame, which was no easy task given our needs. We had to make sure it could be securely mounted to the exterior of the building, where we wanted to avoid doing anything to the glass or the concrete. The design needed to account for the graphic applied as a vinyl sheet (which we couldn’t get printed until the day of installation), and it needed to be weatherproofed with the panels shadowboxed to help mitigate glare from Texas sunlight. On top of all of that, the structure needed to be of an aesthetic quality up to par with everything we do at Handsome.
Matt, Marketing
I minored in architecture, so I figured this was going to be a breeze; though I was also quickly reminded my spatial reasoning and drafting skills were why I stopped pursuing a real degree in it… The rapid-fire sketching and ideation session Matty, Stephen, and I had one afternoon when we were trying to figure this out gave us a host of ideas for managing the necessary power supply, securing the frame to the building to prevent catastrophe, and for the final printed banner/substrate we’d need to turn the design Ivan and Brandon were creating into the pretty face of our skeleton.
Website
Matt, Marketing
Steven, one of our product designers, knocked out two award-worthy websites for both the wayfinding sign and our publication. He’s an amazing designer, which means he’s a busy designer. He didn’t have time to contribute to this article, but we will update this with his thoughts when he has time. Check out his wayfinding and experience sites, and let us know what you think.
Network Considerations
Stephen, Technologist
I knew that having self-hosted WiFi networks on the panels, even with a password, was asking for trouble. SXSW isn’t exactly Defcon, but any gathering of curious people who work in technology is bound to have people who take great pleasure from a creative hack (count me as one of them). That consideration, as well as ensuring an easy process for reprogramming the panels from day to day, led me to the decision to connect all of the panels to a custom-made, isolated and secured network through which they could be synchronously updated.
Design, Fabrication, and Installation
Stephen, Technologist
We landed on a design that could rest on the concrete ledge out front of the office and attach to the exterior with c-clamps and shims on the metal window frames, with the panels mounted directly to 1x4 pieces of wood on the back. We did some stress testing and felt good about the ability for this thing to stay up over the week.
Install day was a blast — lots of helping hands from the office made it fun and easy, if not quick, work. I picked up some plastic sheeting and garage door weather stripping to help with weatherproofing, and some acrylic that we could cut down to sit on top of the panels. When the vinyl face arrived, it was a matter of lining up the panels to the cutouts, affixing the acrylic to the cutouts, and working out a way to line the inside with plastic sheeting while still being able to clamp to the window frame. The application to program the panels, while not easy to use by any measure, was pretty powerful, and I was able to have the panels turn on and off on a timer, and set specific events for each day.
Matt, Marketing
We found a great local print shop and their owner came over to scope out our plans and our studio, and recommended we go with a .3mm thick poly-metal substrate to adhere the printed vinyl to because it’s relatively light-weight, weather resistant, and installation would be simple. The plug-and-play nature of our designs — with a frame built around both the LED panel sizing and within the exterior natural framing our building provided, and the vinyl facade having cutouts specific to the LED panels — set us up [partially/perfectly] for success.
Conclusions
Stephen, Technologist
I went home satisfied but exhausted, and then had stress dreams all night about someone vandalizing the sign before anyone got a chance to see it. Fortunately, this didn’t happen. The rest of the week they were pretty low maintenance, and it was a real joy to come in every day and see it still standing, dry, and functional. I had a lot of fun working on something that was a little outside of my usual realm of expertise, and it was really gratifying to know how many people saw and interacted with it.
Matt, Marketing
This was one of the most rewarding series of projects I’ve ever worked on, largely because I’ve rarely had the opportunity to come up with a crazy idea as a team, plan it, develop it, build it, and see the impact of real-world “impressions and engagement.” The day I was standing on a ladder in the rain applying gorilla tape and painting a top section of the sign (a part of the sign literally no one could see… but we knew it wasn’t right), I had no less than three people stop and ask me about an event they saw scrolling through one of the LED panels. Sure, I seeded some of our featured events with rumors Drake, Kanye, or Daft Punk were playing at SXSW this year, but as a marketer, this was like getting a like on an Instagram post in real life.
Many thanks to Justin Rey Reyna, Steven Hanley, Brandon Termini, Ivan Alonso, Stephen Brown, and the whole Handsome team for their collaboration on this article.
