Foster

Custom-Made Tradeshow and Experiential Marketing

Foster works with customers to bring their brands to life via trade show booths, popup shops, retail spaces, and experiential marketing. With everything from planning to fabricating done in-house and a team that travels for installation and dismantle, they’re a busy team with a company that has been growing greatly over the last several years. They reached out to us as Marketing Genome, looking to rename, rebrand, and redesign their website, and we were happy to help.

We connected the Marketing Genome team with our friends at Always Creative, a team we’ve partnered with for naming many times with great results. With some intensive discussions, strategizing, and ideating, their new name of Foster Display Group rose to the top. With a new name in hand, our team jumped into action with creating the brand mark and brand strategy.

The brand mark consists of a symbol paired with a wordmark. The symbol formed from the concept of building blocks with all of the pieces coming together to form an “F,” akin to how the separate exhibit pieces Foster creates come together for one strong brand display. The logo system includes horizontal and vertical layouts with the short name (Foster), full name (Foster Display Group), and tagline (Building Brand Experiences) as wordmark pairings.

With the new brand in hand, we set to redesigning and redeveloping their website. During flowcharting, we evaluated their site flow from a user’s perspective with the goal of giving visitors a more comprehensive view of what Foster has to offer. Their previous site had become a patchwork of information, stuffed with edits and add-ons from multiple contributors over the years. The new flow was simple and clean, inviting new visitors to learn more if they wanted to, while quickly directing repeat visitors where they needed to go. The new plan also helped Foster’s goal of broadening their core exhibit business and bringing their talents more into the arena of environmental and event work.

The design focused on more muted colors to support and not outshine the colorful display images showcasing what Foster does. Additionally, the three main service areas — exhibits, events, environments — received a specific color association to differentiate the change in areas. The site lets their imagery do most of the talking.

Foster has an extensive amount of information, and the new site has the flex needed for their team to maintain the updates and promote new work or offerings. We developed the WordPress site with custom posts for individual areas and created a library of building modules to shape their pages — particularly their work section — in ways that are meaningful to what Foster wants to show and that fits the content available. With more than a dozen service subpages, a work collection at 45 and growing, and a resource collection consisting of blogs, trade show directories, booth ideas, and e-books and guides, the site’s robust front-end is supported by an equally robust backend. And who doesn’t want a robust backend?