ARTÉ booth

The brief

ARTÉ makes pickleball paddles, balls, apparel and accessories in Singapore. They needed a booth for an event - a three-metre square of floor in a hall full of other people’s three-metre squares.

An event stand has about two seconds to work. Somebody walking past has to know what the brand sells, want to stop, and have a reason to come in - in that order, at walking speed, from the side.

The design

The paddles are the product and the paddles are colourful, so the design makes them the wall. Twelve paddles in an arched, cream-lit niche, which reads from across the hall as one graphic shape rather than as twelve small objects.

Everything else is arranged around getting somebody to stop:

• LED custom letters for the ARTÉ mark, lit so it holds up under hall lighting
• LED inside the arc, so the paddle display glows rather than sits flat
• LED under each shelf, lighting the bottles and boxes from above
• “Grab your free pickleball” - a reason to approach, with a clear ball dispenser doing the visual work
• Artificial grass and a teal court floor, so the stand reads as the sport before anyone reads a word
• A full-length mirror for the apparel

The counter is wrapped in grass and fronted by an oversized paddle and ball. At a trade event the props are the signage.

Why this is here

It is a small job, and it is the same job as everything else on this site: work out what the person in front of it is trying to do, then give the people building it something unambiguous to build from.

The furniture work is where that habit started - renders to sell the idea, dimensioned drawings to make it real.