Event Marketer's Toolbox
Each episode, host Chris Dunn teams up with a leading event professional to explore the tools, tactics, and trends that drive real results.
Event Marketer’s Toolbox is the definitive playbook for corporate event professionals and trade show marketers.
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Event Marketer's Toolbox
EMT #37 with Mitchell Mauk - Storytelling Through Exhibit Design: Metaphor, Simplicity & Impact
In the latest episode of Event Marketer’s Toolbox, Chris Dunn and Dana Esposito sat down with Mitchell Mauk, Principal of Mauk Design, to discuss how storytelling, metaphor, and simplification can transform exhibits into memorable, engaging, and effective experiences.
Mitchell, whose work spans NASA, Google, McDonald’s, AT&T, and O.C. Tanner, shared his insights on how exhibits can communicate complex ideas simply, captivate audiences, and reinforce brand messaging. Even for those who weren’t able to see the visuals, Mitchell “painted a picture” with his examples and explanations, making the episode both educational and actionable.
Key Insights from the Episode:
- Storytelling drives engagement: Exhibits that tell a clear narrative capture attention and make messages stick.
- Metaphor simplifies communication: Using relatable concepts helps attendees remember your message long after the event.
- Simplification enhances interaction: Clear, intuitive design ensures attendees can navigate, engage, and connect with your booth.
- Visual storytelling matters: Graphics, lighting, and spatial cues all reinforce the brand’s story.
Guest Quotes from Mitchell Mauk:
- “Storytelling is how we, as humans, connect. Your exhibit should communicate a narrative, not just information.”
- “Metaphor simplifies communication and makes it easier for people to remember your message.”
- “Simplification lets attendees find and engage with your exhibit—it’s as much about clarity as it is about aesthetics.”
This episode is a must-listen for event marketers, designers, and experiential professionals looking to create exhibits that are not just seen, but experienced, remembered, and talked about.
👉🏼 Join us for more insightful discussions like this by tuning into 'Event Marketer's Toolbox,' where industry leaders share the tools, tactics, and trends driving success in the event world.
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0:00:00
(Chris Dunn)
Hey guys, how are you? Welcome to the Event Marketers Toolbox. We've got a great guest today and of course a great co -host. Hey, but I'm Chris Dunn. I am with Bluehive Exhibits. We're super happy here to have a couple of amazing designers, one of which works for Bluehive.
0:00:19
(Chris Dunn)
Her name is Dana Esposito and she's been a co -host a whole bunch of times, so we are co -workers. We are fortunate to have an amazing, very well -known, and well -respected gentleman from the design world. His name is Mitchum Locke. Dana's going to tell you a little bit more about how they met and how it is that Mitch Mitchell is coming to join us. So Dana, take it away.
0:00:42
(Dana Esposito)
Sure. So I'm Dana Esposito. I'm the EVP of strategy at Blue Hive. Obviously, a lot of years of exhibit design, but also creative leadership and corporate strategy, almost 30 years of it. And yeah, I would like to tell a little bit about Mitchell before Mitchell actually formally introduces himself, and that is years and years ago before I knew Mitchell. As an exhibit designer, I'd be working late all the time, and people would call up and be like, well, did you see what Mitchell Moch just did?
0:01:13
(Dana Esposito)
Did you see what Mitchell Moch just did? And I was at this point where I'm like, if I got to hear one more time what friggin' Mitchell Moch just did, well, did you see what he had in Exhibit Magazine? And I'm like, if I ever meet this guy, I'm kind of like knocking to the ground and kick him in the shin. And wouldn't you know it, I ended up flying out to LA to go to an event design summit. And I get there and I'd worked late the night before. And it's like all you can do as a designer to step away from your desk.
0:01:37
(Dana Esposito)
So if you travel for work, you work more before you go, you work more when you get back to catch up. So it was like a big breath to just get there. And I get there and I'm really combing through everything. And who is the keynote speaker? And so I texted a friend of mine. I'm like, you're not going to believe it.
0:01:54
(Dana Esposito)
Mr. Mark is the keynote speaker. And they're like, what's he like? I'm like, I don't know. He's kind of frightening. away. He doesn't look very tall.
0:02:01
(Dana Esposito)
I could probably take him. So they're like, go get him. So I walked up to him and I waited for him to finish talking to someone. And I said, are you Mitchell Mock? He said, yes. And I said, oh, my name's Dana.
0:02:12
(Dana Esposito)
You know, I work for such and such. And I had always promised myself if I ever met you, I was going to knock you to the ground and kick you in the shin. And he was like, what? And he's like, please sit down. So we sat down and we ended up having a really nice conversation. And I explained to him why I had all this angst and anger.
0:02:30
(Dana Esposito)
And lo and behold, I ended up really liking this little bastard. Then not too long after that, I ended up working on a project with him, which was great because I really got to see how he worked and how he thinks. And we became actually really good friends. I don't get to see Mitchell often, but I consider him very much, you know, one of my work friends and I wish we lived closer. So that's my sort of background on how I decided not to give Mitchell Mock a fat lip. So Mitchell, why don't you go ahead and formally introduce yourself?
0:03:02
(Mitchell Mauk)
Okay, well, that's an interesting introduction. Yeah, I was kind of stunned when I heard that, but I appreciate the lack of violence.
0:03:18
(Speaker 27)
And the honesty.
0:03:20
(Mitchell Mauk)
Yeah, and the honesty, yeah. My background is, I grew up in a family where design and creation was really, really important. My uncle took portraits of Picasso during World War Two. So, you know, being mediocre in the design field was not going to happen. And I went through college and got a degree in graphic design and packaging. and that was sort of the start of it.
0:03:59
(Mitchell Mauk)
And then worked several jobs in graphic design, got into the Silicon Valley, and everybody needed the same thing. They needed a logo, they needed a software box, and they needed a trade show exhibit. So I was like, man, I can do all of that stuff. And so it, the idea that the design looks like it's from one hand or one brain was very important, even though there were different people doing it. And I got a chance to do some trade show exhibits and everybody flipped out. And I was like, oh, well, this is cool, because I had no training at it at all.
0:04:39
(Mitchell Mauk)
And so it was it was great. It was great because it was here was a space. that you could design anything that you wanted as long as it communicated a message. And so that was really, really fun. And I really enjoyed the freedom. And it's like, well, it doesn't have to be a trade show exhibit.
0:05:07
(Mitchell Mauk)
Let's design a piece of communication. And so that's where I ended up doing.
0:05:13
(Speaker 7)
Yeah.
0:05:15
(Dana Esposito)
Before we go too much further, because I have a couple of things I want to let people know about Mitchell that he won't say about himself, because he's too humble, which is of course is adorable quality, and especially the designer. Chris, do you want to do our little commercial before I hog up air?
0:05:34
(Chris Dunn)
Yes, I'll get that in because we never know how much air you're going to hog up. So yes, before we jump into the meat and potatoes, as it were, in this great conversation we're going to have with Mitchell, a couple of things. So first of all, this is a live show. We hope there's some folks out there who are in fact watching and participating. Drop your questions in, let us know where you're checking in from, and let us know your questions.
0:05:56
(Chris Dunn)
And we will do our best to work those in. We have two sponsors. Dana and I happen to work for a wonderful creative agency. It's called Blue Hive Exhibits. We have a location on the East Coast, Boston area, West Coast, Las Vegas. And we like to, think, at least amongst our own in our own walls, that we are a really great size for for multiple sized brands, whether you're a well funded startup, or if you're a multi billion dollar global corporation.
0:06:27
(Chris Dunn)
We're bigger with more resources than a boutique and yet we are small enough when compared to some of the real big guys. You're not a number with us. You're an important person. You're an important client. So we like to feel like we've got a right -sized you know, business model of a little over 100 people. We're, we're deep, but we're also very personal.
0:06:50
(Chris Dunn)
And then secondarily, we've got a great agency that actually helps us put this program on. So I met the folks from, from Fist Bump a couple years ago. The founder, Brandon Lee, and I became friends. I started doing some coaching work with him to help uplevel my, my LinkedIn game, Blue Hive's LinkedIn game, and ultimately led us to a great conversation. about how doing a podcast or a live show like this can be a great media channel to become well known to build your reputation, become a thought leader in your industry. And so that's been the goal is to create honest, you know, conversation, authentic conversation with with event and trade show professionals from all over.
0:07:35
(Chris Dunn)
all different areas of the, of the world. Last year, we were talking, sorry, last week, we were talking to a great guy, Jacob, who specializes in pickleball activations at, at Chicago. And here we are this week with world -renowned and award -winning designer, Mitchum Mock. So it's been really fun to put this together. We are on episode number 37. It gives us great opportunities to have conversations with folks, and it helps us create amazing content that we can then share.
0:08:03
(Chris Dunn)
So that's a little plug for fist bumps. So I'm gonna kick it back to you, Dana, because as you mentioned, you've got some things that you're gonna jump in with on Mitchell right away.
0:08:13
(Dana Esposito)
Yeah, so before we actually get into the meat of it, and because I have, Chris and I both have some very specific questions for Mitchell about how he processes and goes about coming up with the design as a communication tool is, so I feel like COVID sort of set some of the design knowledge, like we in our industry, we all know each other, right. And also, through the EDPA, there's a mentorship program that I helped manage with Justin Dworak, with Bemidji State University and FIT in New York City. And so I started this industry back in like 97. So as years went by, I would hear of people like Charlie McMillan and Mitchell Mock. And they were in, for me, from all the other designers' perspective, they were the ones that we were like, we need to pay attention to how they execute their projects because we knew that they got it. We didn't always have maybe a project that had the budget that maybe some of those did that made it into like Exhibitor Magazine or awards.
0:09:13
(Dana Esposito)
But it was always something that I know designers were looking to to help level up their game and be really successful on behalf of their clients. So with COVID, I just feel like that was just a chunk of time to kind of some of the younger people. I'm like, you don't know who Mitchell Mock is. I'm like, excuse me, hold on, we need to talk. Right. So that's another reason why I'm really excited to have Mitchell here as a guest. Just so that
0:09:40
(Dana Esposito)
some of the younger designers have an opportunity to the exposure to some of the things he's going to talk about today. I would love for people to, you know, whether they're other designers at other exhibit companies, trade show and event managers, you know, Google Mitchell Mock and look at some of his design work in the past. And he also has, there was a book that came out, go to Exhibitor Align, plug his name in, you'll see projects that he executed that came up. You know, he's award -winning, his designs are very, you know, keep it simple, stupid, and that, you know, That's a very powerful thing because people can understand very much, very quickly what a company does and why you'd want to work with them through the language of the design structure, which is really important. Also, he's been a speaker at Exhibitor Live, teaching sessions. He's been a speaker at event design summits.
0:10:36
(Dana Esposito)
He's been the keynote speaker up at Bemidji State University at one of their TAD talks. And those are just the ones that I know about, right? So he's not going to tell you all this. He's not going to tell you he's an award -winning designer, and he's not also an egotistical jerk. I would tell you that. He is not.
0:10:52
(Dana Esposito)
We would not be friends if he was built that way. But he's also, you know, he has had his own design studio out in California near San Francisco for years. And he's mentored a lot of young designers coming up. And even years ago, when I reached out and asked him if he'd be a design mentor for one of our students, he said yes. And then he even took her on as an intern. And all the designers my age were like, What is happening?
0:11:27
(Dana Esposito)
Like this person gets to be an intern with Michelle Mock. So it's just, it's just very cool and I want people to understand. how much of an impact Mitchell has had on our industry and that the designers really appreciate it. You know, in the beginning there, I was frustrated with him because people are always calling me and saying, your design is nice, but did you see what Mitchell did? So it was like constantly rising because something they saw in a magazine that had a way better budget, right, than what I was working on. So that's why I was frustrated.
0:11:55
(Dana Esposito)
And I was like, okay, this guy needs to be stopped. And then of course, I ended up really liking him. And I was like, son of a monkey. So that's some of his background that's just really important. I'm not just trying to blow smoke. He's a good person to look at his work because it's very educational when you're trying to understand why an exhibit should look a certain way and how that's important to how a human's brain takes information in.
0:12:25
(Speaker 26)
That's my spiel.
0:12:26
(Dana Esposito)
All right. So I am going to launch into our first actual question question for you to give you, Mitchell, an opportunity to kind of help educate and our audience about about design. So we're going to talk a little bit about storytelling and exhibit design.
0:12:44
(Mitchell Mauk)
And so the question is, you know, why is storytelling essential in exhibits? Well, storytelling in from where I come from, at least, is this is about how communication is transferred for people from, you know, the beginning of history, from the beginning of people. Sitting around the cave, the campfire in the cave, was how you communicated, okay, here's how you gather food, here's how you hunt animals, here's what not to do, don't eat this kind of bark. All of this happened around the campfire and it was all communicated in stories. Stories are how we as a species communicate our information. And it's like, you want to engage people that are in the show floor, because if you just put up a big box that says, don't you love our product?
0:13:52
(Mitchell Mauk)
Come buy. you know, that's not going to engage anybody. It's not going to, it's going to not make anybody feel like they've been included in it. And so sharing those stories is the baseline, at least for everything that we try and do. We try and get in there and say, okay, here's what we, here's the end result. How do we get to that stage through, through our stories?
0:14:20
(Mitchell Mauk)
And, um, So you're giving a series of events and unique conversation that happens on the show floor with those stories. And that's always, always a key. And one of the cool things about that is at the end of the day, I find if I have depicted the story, if I've depicted the communication, the exhibit doesn't look like anything else on the show floor, nothing. It's like, Well, we followed the directions, we followed the information, and it led us to something that, you know, won an award or got a new client or something over that.
0:15:04
(Dana Esposito)
But You really want to be able to say, here's how we supported your messaging with this thing that gets built on a piece of concrete. I was always proud of, and this sounds weird, like proud of a client, but you must have always been really good at verbalizing that stuff to clients. because some clients ask for that. They want to be really different. They want to stand out. But there are different levels of where all those adjectives actually really fall and also where their creative bravery lands.
0:15:38
(Dana Esposito)
It seems so many of your clients, you must have been able to verbalize that really well because you've had some really powerful exhibit design solutions where it's exactly, you said, it doesn't look like anything else. They don't look like everyone else in their industry, don't look like everybody else on the trade show floor. And you know, looking at it, that that was a deviation for them from their normal and it didn't blow up their brand.
0:16:03
(Speaker 25)
It didn't do any of that, but it's so different from everything else.
0:16:08
(Mitchell Mauk)
Yeah. What, one of the things that the way I approach that is I actually don't talk about it. I don't talk about. Well, we used red, and it's triangular, and it has perforations. We don't talk about any of that. The entire focus on the presentation is, here's how we're going to communicate your message, your unique selling proposition.
0:16:36
(Mitchell Mauk)
Here's how we're going to explain it to the people on the show floor who, you know, there's all kinds of chaos there. And if you get to the end of the presentation, it's like, well, the guy said that he was going to do all this communication, I guess we better do that. And I don't really talk about why the design looks like what it looks like.
0:17:04
(Chris Dunn)
So that's been my philosophy from the beginning, and it's stood me in well. Can I jump in just with a quick question on that? And we also, actually, Travis Stanton has joined us. So he's a big fan. He's got his own, he's got a handful of designs that he loves, but wants to know what's your personal favorite. We can get that.
0:17:27
(Chris Dunn)
We'll get to that later, Travis. Mitchell, question for you, just when you're working with the brand, and you're trying to tell their story, do they have clarity on what that story is already? I mean, I guess the bigger the brand, the more work they've done with agencies and the refinement.
0:17:45
(Mitchell Mauk)
But I'm curious, do brands sometimes think they're saying one thing, but you, in the conversation and design process with them, you almost unearth, it needs to be tweaked. Sometimes they understand. And sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get information out of what they want to communicate. And sometimes you just like, OK, here's what we're going to do. You know, we're going to do this because I know that we can communicate this. You know, one of the things about all these messages is some of them don't really gel on the show floor.
0:18:29
(Mitchell Mauk)
You know, it's like it's too ethereal. It's too soft and fuzzy or something and so it you know I try and try and follow as much as what they're giving me but sometimes it's like oh I know here's your presentation here's your communication that you want that's not going to work but here's what we can do and so because the trade show The communication that happens in a trade show is unique. It's like being stuck in 30 infomercials all running at the same time. You know, this, this anarchy.
0:19:17
(Dana Esposito)
And so that's, that's really important. Yeah. Well, the projects where the clients trusted you, it's really obvious, you know, they're the ones that stand out and just seem to be the most powerful. So I love that. We're going to do something different today.
0:19:34
(Mitchell Mauk)
Mitchell's actually going to be showing some imagery. So while I'm assuming you're going to be pulling those up, because I was going to ask you about examples from projects, maybe like NASA or Google, McDonald's, whatever order you want to talk about some of those, maybe talking about some of the attendee engagement and the brand messaging.
0:19:56
(Speaker 7)
Yeah, some of those.
0:19:58
(Mitchell Mauk)
Uh, Google is, uh, still under an NDA, so I can't target anything about that. Never happened.
0:20:06
(Chris Dunn)
Never, never happened, but, uh, never even heard of Google.
0:20:10
(Mitchell Mauk)
I have no idea what that is. I am going to replace that with, uh, apple. So, uh, I was going to ask you just from a timing standpoint, obviously you being in the Silicon Valley in the eighties and nineties and so forth, like rubbing elbows with like, uh, you know, Steve Jobs and Larry and all the guys? Yeah, I never met Larry, but I worked with Steve Jobs. I worked for a consultants firm for five years in Silicon Valley, and most of what we did was for Apple. we did all of the brand identity for the Apple Lisa computer, which was the predecessor to the Mac. Everything that a Mac became was in a Lisa computer, which was a $10 ,000 computer instead of a $2 ,000 computer.
0:21:08
(Mitchell Mauk)
And so I got to work with Steve Jobs a little bit on that. And a lot of other companies, some of which don't exist anymore because they got bought for billions of dollars. So, but it was, it was an exhilarating time. You went in every day into work and you were going to invent the future. You had no idea what was coming.
0:21:36
(Chris Dunn)
And but it was it was really exciting.
0:21:39
(Speaker 24)
And it was a great opportunity.
0:21:42
(Mitchell Mauk)
Yeah, that's super cool.
0:21:44
(Speaker 23)
All right.
0:21:44
(Speaker 22)
I'm going to share my window here.
0:21:48
(Chris Dunn)
All righty. Sounds good. One is behind the scenes. She's going to help pull that up. And we'll do our best because we know a lot of folks will be consuming this content via podcast and not necessarily looking at us or watching us in the future.
0:22:08
(Mitchell Mauk)
So we'll also do our best to do some descriptions as well as based on what we're seeing and interacting with.
0:22:28
(Chris Dunn)
We're teasing, we're teasing this so well. Okay, so is that coming up?
0:22:36
(Mitchell Mauk)
Yes. All right, thanks Juana. All right, what are we looking at here? So I said that I started out doing graphics. This was one of the things about graphic design that's different from trade show design is graphic design, you have a very, you know, got a postage size stamp of in which to communicate information. And
0:23:06
(Mitchell Mauk)
is one logo that I designed and had approximately 35 years of design of their trade show exhibits. And I was very proud of this design. It was based on an exhibit where they wanted me to use their old logo, which was a D and an A and a slant. And I referred to it as the flying duh. And I happened to be sitting next to the guy who had designed it. So that did not go over well.
0:23:47
(Mitchell Mauk)
Whoopsie. But I told him that I would design a logo that would make sense. So this one is all about the parts, which is what they're about. They're not behind any one brand. So it was all about parts. So that was really one of the more successful stories that I had been able to tell.
0:24:10
(Mitchell Mauk)
We had talked about using graphics in trade shows, and how we want the graphics to look as if it had been designed in from the very beginning.
0:24:23
(Speaker 7)
McDonald's has their own show, and they take over the entire Orlando Convention Center for their own show.
0:24:33
(Mitchell Mauk)
Massive, and we designed it for 10 years, and you're just like, So often we're confined to 400 square feet. Well, here was like, how many tens of thousands of square feet do you want? It's a big canvas. Yeah. But I remember how I got the project, which was sitting back in my office. for somebody to call and I get this call and it's, hello, this is McDonald's.
0:25:09
(Mitchell Mauk)
You've heard of us? It's this heavy Swiss German accent. And so that led to 10 years of working together. It was great. So here was, this was all about taking a graphic design, blowing it up and making it Great, um, we talked about, uh, you know, metaphor in, uh, you know, trade share exhibit. And I think this is probably the best example that I've got, which was they wanted all of their.
0:25:47
(Mitchell Mauk)
franchisees to re -image their buildings, which were looking really dated. And it was a $400 ,000 hit to the franchisee. And he's like, I don't know if I want to do that. So the idea of unpackaging a new McDonald's arch was at the entrance to the exhibit. And it was all about fabrication. construction, because it was going to disrupt your restaurant.
0:26:25
(Mitchell Mauk)
So we built the entire exhibit out of scaffolding. Now, one of the things I learned also was from the money standpoint, there was a significant amount of money for fabrication, but you spread it out over, you know, 100 ,000 or 200 ,000 square feet. It doesn't go very far.
0:26:47
(Chris Dunn)
So we bought a bunch of scaffolding and then we had some aluminum foil there and a lot of foam things. And that was one way of communicating. It's all about the re -imaging, but it's about construction. Right. I just want to do a little description before you move past.
0:27:09
(Chris Dunn)
So for those folks who are ingesting this via podcast after the fact, the first image that you mentioned after the logo design talk, you had the iconic McDonald's M. So basically, one of the arches was kind of recognizable in its traditional yellow, but then the kind of the middle part of the M and the other part is still, it's crated up. And it's a beautiful, obviously, metaphor. And just you look at that and you're just like, okay, we're under construction. So that took it and then you moved us to kind of the idea of using a scaffolding as your vehicle to kind of be part of this storytelling device is brilliant, right? Because we all have seen scaffolding around construction sites.
0:27:59
(Mitchell Mauk)
It's instantly recognizable and at the same time, still very cost -effective, right?
0:28:04
(Speaker 10)
To buy it, set it up and move it around.
0:28:06
(Chris Dunn)
So you've got these three -dimensional foam letters that say reimagining hung across a very, looks like a on a hundred foot long wall or something like that, but very, very imaginative usage, non -traditional materials.
0:28:22
(Mitchell Mauk)
Like, yeah, just kind of hits you right in the face.
0:28:25
(Chris Dunn)
Awesome stuff.
0:28:27
(Mitchell Mauk)
Well, I'll tell you a desperation budget figures works, works wonders in the creative thing. There you go. Creativity is the mother of all invention. The creative director who contacted me first, the second thing, He said, well, you know, we're at McDonald's and we're really cheap. We got to sell a lot of cheeseburgers and french fries to fund all this. But they were a wonderful client to work for.
0:29:03
(Mitchell Mauk)
Just amazing. Knew what they wanted to say. They allowed us how to go about saying it, which was important. This design is further on in the exhibit. It has towers that are made out of scaffolding. And then in the back, it says, now is the time to re -image.
0:29:24
(Mitchell Mauk)
And there's a whole bunch of dots that are actual clocks. and the clocks are ticking down, that it's time to reimage your restaurant. And finding all of those clocks was really interesting. We heard that they were not available anywhere. And we went over to IKEA and discovered an entire pallet of them. And we purchased 700 clocks on the pallet and had them delivered to the fabricator like in a day and a half.
0:30:03
(Mitchell Mauk)
It was it was great. Another item here in the McDonald's exhibit was the the logo and then behind that are big post -it notes and this wall of You know, what are your recommendations.
0:30:21
(Chris Dunn)
What are your concerns with re imaging the idea listening to the franchise. He was really important. And, you know, here's a, you know, another $50 idea, but it's using the listening to the to the franchisees, which is really important to McDonald's. It's one of the things that separates them as a company, right?
0:30:48
(Mitchell Mauk)
Yeah, and we've actually Going way back in our early days of our pod We had a wonderful guest on Liz Latham who runs a club each e and they they lean heavy into using these large Post -it notes and they call them like live brainstorming sessions. But yeah, what a what a great?
0:31:06
(Chris Dunn)
way super simple, old school, tactile, right?
0:31:11
(Mitchell Mauk)
But you're transferring this information, you're garnering or gathering the ideas and thoughts from your guests at the show. And you can turn those into really actionable elements. Yeah, they got put into binders and passed around the conference rooms. Every time they were They were talking about re -imaging that got passed around and really affected the way things went. Nice. Yeah, that's great.
0:31:42
(Mitchell Mauk)
Oh, now, one of their researchers found this in the archives from McDonald's. This is a letter from Ray Kroc, who was at that point long dead, describing how important it was to innovate and re -imagine your restaurant. So it's from 1958 or something, 78. I think it's, but it was a long time after he had died. So we took this letter and the franchisees love Ray Kroc, absolutely do.
0:32:28
(Chris Dunn)
And he's, you know, he was one of the founders.
0:32:34
(Speaker 21)
And so we put this, xerox of his
0:32:40
(Chris Dunn)
letter front and center, right as you exited this area. The franchisees just flipped out.
0:32:50
(Mitchell Mauk)
They loved it.
0:32:51
(Speaker 20)
It happened to be a letter that described exactly what we needed to have them do 20 years later.
0:33:00
(Mitchell Mauk)
From its message from beyond the grave. That's right.
0:33:03
(Speaker 5)
It's remarkable.
0:33:04
(Mitchell Mauk)
The Great Clock still closing after he - Still closing. Still closing after he closed. Yeah. And at that point, you just go, we got to make this really important. And so we put it right in the center. That's very cool.
0:33:19
(Mitchell Mauk)
OK, so let's talk about Apple. Yeah. So at the while I was in the Silicon Valley, I was always doing work for Apple as a as a consultant, as an employee, as an intern. And we all think about Apple in this white, clean, super design. And they did have a reputation from the logo on down of being really into the design. Sometimes they weren't very good at it.
0:33:59
(Mitchell Mauk)
So this is a design. They designed a system of for their trade shows and it was called the mainframe system. And it was kind of like Legos.
0:34:17
(Chris Dunn)
You could build anything.
0:34:18
(Speaker 19)
But it also had the downside of Legos, which was it took you forever to build anything.
0:34:26
(Speaker 18)
And when you're on the trade show floor, you've got people that are in a hurry, you've got a certain number of days,
0:34:35
(Chris Dunn)
this thing was heavy.
0:34:36
(Speaker 6)
And so I won a competition to redesign the mainframe system.
0:34:43
(Chris Dunn)
And one of the other problems that this had was, you know, there's like 12 messages there. And you know, roughly what eight, what, uh, what year that was Mitchell?
0:34:57
(Mitchell Mauk)
Uh, I think it was 96. Really? Okay. So it's that recent. So yeah. So those folks who didn't see it, it's a little bit of a word vomit.
0:35:06
(Mitchell Mauk)
There's colors, there's, there's messages, there's those big old old school monitors with the big giant cabooses on them. Yeah, it's it doesn't even look like what you picture today as as the sleek, you know, Apple type of design. Yeah. So one of the real problems that Apple had with this exhibit is that, again, you've got this multicolored exhibit and the renderings show it on a white background. Well, that's all well and good, but it never appears on a white background. And when you put it into the context of a trade show environment, it is the perfect camouflage.
0:35:48
(Mitchell Mauk)
It blends in, blends entirely into the background. So what we said was, let's make it simple and clean and white. And when you put it against this anarchy, visual anarchy, it stands out because of its simplicity. And so what we designed was one of the first implementations of that white.
0:36:23
(Chris Dunn)
And this is what we ended up with. So this is the system. This is the same system, but simplified. Really?
0:36:33
(Mitchell Mauk)
And we cut 40 % of the weight out, reduced the man hours to set it up by 27%. And, and whereas before you couldn't really tell what the message was, this message is right front and center.
0:36:52
(Chris Dunn)
It's one message. And they, at, at the time where they were having some financial troubles and they were able to get another three years of use out of this system before they had to replace it. Wow. Okay. This is amazing. So it looks, if I were to see this today, I would say, oh, that's a big, you know, fabric light box or something.
0:37:14
(Mitchell Mauk)
I'm sure it wasn't at the time or, or is that internally lit?
0:37:18
(Speaker 17)
Yes, it's internally with with light with with light You use light on the inside of the way It was something that was Early, yeah, the early days of dye sub.
0:37:39
(Mitchell Mauk)
So yeah, you can print color on fabric. It was that's amazing, right?
0:37:43
(Speaker 11)
I do remember those are the the mid the mid 90s.
0:37:47
(Mitchell Mauk)
So power plus ease plus compatibility plus multimedia equals Apple logo.
0:37:54
(Chris Dunn)
That's I mean, Epic.
0:37:56
(Dana Esposito)
Now, were you part of the process or part of the design and thought process that took all of that menagerie of gobbledygook that we saw in the previous picture and got it to this point?
0:38:07
(Chris Dunn)
As a graphic designer, did you participate in that process?
0:38:10
(Mitchell Mauk)
Or were you more structural? I didn't. In this case, it was, how do we show a great message?
0:38:18
(Dana Esposito)
And every time they had something that was too complicated, I was like, no, no, he's got to be
0:38:25
(Speaker 5)
be simple, you know? But yeah, this was, I was pretty proud of the way this happened.
0:38:34
(Chris Dunn)
That is, that's amazing. It's a radical difference from where they were. Yeah. I mean, the look, the feel, but the fact that you also, you know, leveraged such huge savings with regards to shipping and like saying problems we're having, you know, now, 30 years later, shipping, drayage, man hours of setup, like all that stuff, still a thing. Oh my gosh. You have to design everything out of feathers.
0:39:01
(Chris Dunn)
So the drayage cost doesn't kill you.
0:39:04
(Speaker 16)
Right.
0:39:05
(Chris Dunn)
So true. So, right. And they get an increased longevity out of that system that they had already invested in for assets.
0:39:11
(Mitchell Mauk)
So what you were talking about earlier is, is amazing. because it's, it's so simple yet true. And I know when we create designs, uh, Dana and her amazing team, typically we're showing it on a field of white or black or something like that. But the reality of the noise in that trade show hall is you called it anarchy, right? It's visual pollution. There's just all of the exhibits just kind of meld together and your eye has no idea where to go because there's so much stuff.
0:39:39
(Mitchell Mauk)
Right. So, so, um, showing, you know, what, what the reality of the background is, is kind of brilliant, right? And saying, well, let's do, let's see, we can see easily what doesn't work. Let's, let's see what does work. I have, uh, I have actually done presentations where we'll show the new design and the background we'll use in the renderings is, uh, photographs of the show floor from that, from that, uh, industry, same show. And, uh, we Photoshop it in behind and, uh, all of a sudden, Oh, that's, you know, something that looks so simple like the like the the apple right here.
0:40:20
(Mitchell Mauk)
we did. So what? It's white. So what? Well, in the context is what is really important there. So what we did, we reduced the message to the absolute minimum.
0:40:42
(Mitchell Mauk)
Ideally, it's one word or a phrase or four words in this. way. One of the things that we really try to do is get everybody on the same page. Okay, this is the message that we're going to try and communicate with this exhibit. And then you go to the design. And getting everybody to agree on that is really critical, particularly the boss, whichever boss, you know, it's head of marketing, it's a president of the company.
0:41:19
(Mitchell Mauk)
We want that message, you know, there is support all the way down the way for that message. And that's where you are able to really start running and just do something amazing. And so these are all kind of simplifications, putting a message front and center. You know, it's one message when you walked up to the Apple exhibit, there were lots of equipment around. But there was only one message that really communicated what it was about. And then you start asking yourself, is this design that we've got helping or hurting clarity of our message?
0:42:11
(Mitchell Mauk)
We don't want the design of the exhibit to be competing. with the message itself. Okay, so this is going back to the first logo that we showed, the Duncan Aviation. Now, fortunately, I was dealing with Robert Duncan, who is the family that owns Duncan Aviation. And so we came up with an exhibit And right and left here, you can see portraits. These are portraits of their people.
0:42:54
(Mitchell Mauk)
And as we were walking around the hangars in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the marketing guy, you know, we had lists of things that they wanted to communicate. And one of his comments, which was off the cuff, he says, you know, what's really important about this, this company is the people, the people that work here, they stay here forever. And they're high quality, people with high quality education, they do a great job. And I'm like, great, that's it. Everybody read that was the message. And, and it was just a offhand comment.
0:43:37
(Mitchell Mauk)
So we designed this exhibit, it's made out of perforated metal, powder coated, and ashes together. And on the right and left, you've got portraits of some of the employees, there's 12 portraits. And And, you know, three or four people from the interior shop, three or four people from the paint shop, two people doing design, et cetera. And so I did the presentation and everybody loved it. And then somebody in the back goes, what about the rest of the people? You know, the people who aren't in those portraits.
0:44:14
(Speaker 12)
And so what I did was I took this center post and it has the signature of every employee in the company is done in gold on this black tower.
0:44:30
(Mitchell Mauk)
And it was a really powerful statement in a trade show full of pictures of airplanes. We had no pictures of airplanes in our exhibit. And at the time, they had the the flying logo. And I was like, yeah, it's too ugly. It's too ugly.
0:44:57
(Chris Dunn)
I can't use it in the exhibit. It's going to wreck the whole statement. And so sorry, your logo is too ugly. Your logo is too ugly. Yeah. You know, I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that with clients.
0:45:15
(Chris Dunn)
So I use this placeholder type.
0:45:19
(Mitchell Mauk)
And then after that, we went back and designed a whole design system for you for them, which started out with a logo that I showed first. Unfortunately, when you do a really good logo, it becomes part of the industry. And so for 35 years, I haven't been able to redesign anything on their identity.
0:45:44
(Dana Esposito)
You're like, you're like the Maytag repairman, right? He's got nothing to do because he built his first product was sitting around waiting for it to age doesn't work. Yeah. So that that's, let's let's camp on this for a hot second.
0:46:00
(Chris Dunn)
You have an iconic looking, interesting booth at an aviation show and you have no reference points to airplanes. doing the opposite of what everyone else thinks or is doing is a way to stand out because you're so different. You embraced the humanity and the people and the personalities of those folks and made the booth about them versus about a fuselage and a wing and a wheel. Yeah, and the important thing there is it's different for a reason.
0:46:40
(Speaker 12)
It's not different to be different.
0:46:42
(Mitchell Mauk)
It's different for a reason because that's you follow, you follow the communications and you let that dictate how the thing looks.
0:46:53
(Speaker 15)
So Chris, question for you.
0:46:56
(Mitchell Mauk)
I know. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just gonna ask you timing wise, because I know Mitchell has other images to show us and talk about, but I also wanna be cognizant of time. So do you want to - Yeah, no, that's a good heads up. We try to cap it at about an hour, Mitchell.
0:47:15
(Mitchell Mauk)
So we've got about 13 minutes left based on where we're at. The one thing I just wanted to add here or ask was, there's gotta be a naysayer in the room who says, how can we possibly do this without talking about what we really do. I mean, and I don't want to, I don't want to extend that conversation too much, but you get across, uh, get everybody across the, the finish line on that because you have agreement what the message is ahead of time. Uh, yes. Uh, part of that part of it is that, and part of it is, uh, here's how we're going to communicate what you want to communicate. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
0:47:57
(Mitchell Mauk)
And, uh, once you do that, that, it's hard for them to go back and say, well, I don't like green or something. Because in the presentation, you've said, here's why we're using green, because this is what we need to communicate. And so that, that helps. And I've, you know, I don't spend a lot of time talking about design theory or very much about the design at all. It's a matter of, you know, For example, the one wall we've got here has portraits of every employee in the company, 700.
0:48:37
(Mitchell Mauk)
And nobody asks about why it's that shape or why it's that color, et cetera. So that was the second exhibit.
0:48:49
(Chris Dunn)
The next exhibit was 10 years later and it had this floating cloud over it.
0:48:58
(Speaker 4)
2 ,000 employees at this point. And the photograph, we had a gobo of an airplane that you can see just down by the lower right hand corner of the logo, the airplane flying across the sky.
0:49:21
(Mitchell Mauk)
So it was just this tiny little gobo in a motorized light. And that was the motion. But everybody saw it. And of course, they all knew which model airplane it was based on the silhouette. So lots of portraits held up by aluminum rods. And then on the back, we put to talk about, you know, it's a customer business.
0:49:56
(Mitchell Mauk)
We put letters of recommendation that their customers had written to them over the years. And we just had a display of a dozen or so letters of recommendation that said, you know, hey, you did a great job for us. And that was really important. What's more powerful than the recommendation of an unbiased client? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
0:50:31
(Mitchell Mauk)
And even, you know, this was a graphic display case showing the idea of selling an airplane from one person to another, and we used these artists' hands. So, you know, it's depicting the same information, but in a new and fresh way. This next one, OC Tanner. This is HR. I'll flip through this pretty quickly. One of the things that was important here was that everything was moving. And he had this giant Frankenstein switch up front.
0:51:08
(Mitchell Mauk)
And so that was moving. We took their graphics from their corporate brochure and enlarged them, depicted it. And the people, the person in this pot is growing up and it's motorized so it raises up out of the pot and it says grow your people this was motorized also believe and high five high five and the motorized hands and uh that worked really well for this company.
0:51:55
(Chris Dunn)
And then I think, okay, so this is the I'm going to skip ahead to NASA.
0:52:15
(Mitchell Mauk)
NASA, we did for show in South Africa, Cape Cod, and we couldn't ship anything. And we had no money. There was no money for anything. And so we designed an exhibit for NASA, the U . S. government that was made out of foam core and fabric.
0:52:45
(Dana Esposito)
These graphics that are floating in space here, those are foam core cutouts. It was the idea of what they wanted to show was, hey, we've been at this a long time and we have a very good idea of what we're doing.
0:53:03
(Chris Dunn)
And it was 50 years of peaceful space exploration.
0:53:07
(Dana Esposito)
And then inside the exhibit was a big empty space. and the astronauts would talk down from orbit to you. Oh, that's super cool. So that was a really great experience working with the people at NASA. And let's see, I think that's the idea. Yeah, this here we distilled this message down and the graphics were integral to the exhibit itself.
0:53:41
(Mitchell Mauk)
It was it was really come at such a high level.
0:53:45
(Dana Esposito)
the guidelines that we use that always seem to pay off for us in the long run.
0:53:51
(Mitchell Mauk)
And I think that's most of what I have to say.
0:53:55
(Dana Esposito)
What about, do you, oh sorry, we might be running low on time so I don't know if I want to ask my question.
0:54:04
(Speaker 7)
But I'll answer quickly.
0:54:06
(Mitchell Mauk)
Go for it Dana.
0:54:08
(Chris Dunn)
Okay, so on that HR exhibit where you were showing all the different components that they were moving and you literally had like their brochure or like website type iconography coming to life and moving, you'd mentioned the big Frankenstein switch. But what was really interesting about this exhibit back when I had first heard about it back in the day was it was about how HR is integral. It was at an HR show where you'd come over and you'd flip that switch. And when you flip the switch and you shut that off, essentially you're shutting everything down. Everything in the exhibit stops moving, all those three -dimensional parts and pieces. So it's a really great metaphor about how growing your people versus not having HR and not growing your people affects a company's well -being.
0:54:51
(Chris Dunn)
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I use it as an exhibit when I talk to students. It turned off all the lights, you know, it stopped moving and then turned off all the lights. It was like, oh, yeah, real big kill switch. Oh, I get it. Oh, I get it, you know.
0:55:10
(Mitchell Mauk)
Right, no HR, no company. Awesome. Well, Mitchell, this has been a great conversation. Dana, thank you for helping kind of manage the clock here. I think we could sit here and go through designs with Mitchell for hours. We do try to keep it right around one hour here on the toolbox.
0:55:31
(Mitchell Mauk)
So thank you for your help and thank you for spending some time with us. Mitchell, I got two questions for you. So earlier, a friend of ours
0:55:40
(Chris Dunn)
Travis Stanton, had said he's a huge fan of the VW, the D -Wave, the Ampra, Accorda, RockShox, Duncan Aviation, et cetera. He's a big fan of those, but he was wondering if you had a personal favorite in your portfolio. Like, which is your favorite child? Well, exactly.
0:56:04
(Mitchell Mauk)
I don't really have a favorite. For me, the favorite has always been the next one. It's a great opportunity. It's a space that, unlike business cards, you don't know what it has to look like. So I get a rush out of a trade show environment. And I think that that's always been the answer.
0:56:30
(Mitchell Mauk)
It's the next one. What can we do next? Nice, exciting. It certainly keeps you motivated. And then secondarily, if you could leave our audience with a couple of actionable takeaways, what might that be? What might they be?
0:56:50
(Mitchell Mauk)
Well, I think I've covered a lot of it.
0:56:52
(Chris Dunn)
Distill the message. Distill, distill, distill.
0:56:55
(Dana Esposito)
Get it down to the absolute minimum. What is the minimum communication to get it across? The best way to wreck a good exhibit is to use bad graphics. So really put some time and effort into the graphics. Ideally, my background is in graphics and trade shows, so I just sort of do it. But if you've got a graphic designer and a trade show designer, have them work hand in hand, preferably side by side, to get them to work together.
0:57:31
(Dana Esposito)
And I find that most trade show exhibits work best with the human element. How do people enter into it? And I think that that's really critical for all trade show exhibits. And I think that's most of it. Yeah, that's awesome. That's wonderful, wonderful information to leave us with.
0:57:59
(Speaker 14)
Yeah.
0:57:59
(Mitchell Mauk)
And I use a lot of Mitchell's projects as examples. I present Mitchell's projects often to students as when they're trying to learn why exhibit looks the way that they do.
0:58:10
(Speaker 13)
So I feel like I know a lot of his work, maybe almost as much as he did.
0:58:14
(Chris Dunn)
I just didn't have to suffer through the design part of the process.
0:58:19
(Mitchell Mauk)
I really appreciate that you've always been so selfless with sharing all of your knowledge with the future generation of designers. So I appreciate you and what you contribute.
0:58:30
(Speaker 12)
And I know that over whatever amount of years, you're figuring out your exit strategy.
0:58:37
(Speaker 11)
So you can just enjoy time with your family as you get older.
0:58:41
(Speaker 10)
But I hope you let me to continue dragging you in to speak and do educational things, because I'm not quite ready for you to not be around us.
0:58:50
(Dana Esposito)
You're just a wealth of knowledge and enjoy to be around. So I appreciate you. All right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate being still considered.
0:59:01
(Chris Dunn)
Yeah, absolutely. So Mitchell, if folks want to reach out and get ahold of you, what is the best way to do that? Email works really well.
0:59:11
(Speaker 9)
It's Mitchell at mockdesign .
0:59:15
(Mitchell Mauk)
com.
0:59:16
(Chris Dunn)
And that's what we're doing.
0:59:18
(Dana Esposito)
That's what we're doing. That's where they can find you. Yeah, check out his website.
0:59:22
(Speaker 8)
He's got a lot of work, a lot of work in Dubai and airports, a lot of really simple but great info, like informational stuff.
0:59:30
(Dana Esposito)
for people, humans to navigate. He's very good at thinking about how humans process that information, so.
0:59:37
(Chris Dunn)
Yeah, great, great retail stuff as well.
0:59:39
(Dana Esposito)
I love the colorful kayaks at that, I think the surf shop.
0:59:44
(Speaker 6)
Not that I'm an aspiring surfer, but you know, if I had to be, I would go there for sure.
0:59:49
(Chris Dunn)
If I could be. They make you look good. Yeah, awesome, awesome. All right, well this has been a great - Hang on, for people looking at previous work, also see if you can find Mitchell's CMYK exhibit, CMYK magazine exhibit, and then also there was a tile, Italian tile exhibit that you had done that was really interesting too. And I think an AGAM exhibit, you did an AGAM exhibit. Anyway, I could go on and on.
1:00:14
(Chris Dunn)
Yeah. I'm like kind of like a weird groupie who started off really wanting to dislike you and beat you up.
1:00:22
(Speaker 7)
That was a great intro, I gotta say. Probably the first time somebody ever said, welcome, welcome, here's how I wanted to punch you in the face when I first met you.
1:00:35
(Speaker 6)
I always say what I think, so that could be dangerous for some people. That's great. All right guys, we got to wrap it up here on the toolbox. Thank you so much for being our guest Dana Thanks for joining in Mitchell. It's great episode. Appreciate it.
1:00:48
This is the first time that we tried doing sharing some visuals I know I'm a super visual person. It was great to see that Might be harder to listen to this one, but listen, if you're listening to this in the future on a podcast, go back, find it on YouTube, find it on LinkedIn, because you're gonna get a lot more from it when you can see the imagery that was shared. So, hey guys, thank you so much, happy eventing, have a great rest of the week, and we'll see you again next week, same time, same place here on the Toolbox. So, thanks everybody, cheers, take care. Thank you, bye. Bye -bye.
