SpinTO Infographic Projections

The craziness that was SpinTO is mostly behind me after having helped organize the party that raised $15,000 for the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation. It was a heck of a lot of work to organize this project, but also a lot of fun.

Designing Projected Visuals
On top of the time I put into the project co-ordinating a large chunk of the Web property and the event itself, I had my hand at designing the visuals over the course of a few days that would be projected at the Mod Club throughout the night to promote our sponsors, illuminate the amazing work the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation does for this city and some interesting facts about the Friends for Life Bike Rally.

Channel and Theme
I typically design for desktop displays, mobile phones and occasionally service kiosks, so the idea of designing for 20-foot wide screens at a club was new territory for me. The visuals needed to be easily readable and visible from any part of the club, so that meant big font size and high-contrast, vibrant graphics.

Keeping with the feel of SpinTO and the brilliant design produced by Phouphet Sihavong, the visuals also needed to have a bit of an urban retro-modern feel to them with heavy emphasis on cycling as a central theme. I re-used many graphics and elements from the SpinTO web site in order to maintain a consistent look and feel in the physical space as we had in the virtual.

Audience
The ‘users’ in this case are also an interesting set of people to design for – I by no means wanted to create distractions that would take focus away from the performances happening on stage, or slow down the momentum of the night in any way.

It was also important to keep in mind that people were there to have a good time – mingle, talk, dance, and (of course) drink. This meant that I was going to use primarily dark backgrounds for the slides, positive messaging and tone, and fast transitions and builds between slides. I also felt it was important to design the graphics with the philosophy of a billboard in mind, assuming each would get a glance at most and needed to be fairly easily understood right away.

Promotion and Persuasion
The event was a fundraiser first, as well as a party, so I dedicated quite a few screens to promoting the fundraising opportunities around the Mod Club. We wanted to maximize the potential for attendees to drop cash as they saw fit, so the visuals let them know that by buying our specialty drink called the ‘Cause-Mo’, we’d dedicate a portion of the sales directly to the charity. We also advertised items for auction and raffle, the opportunity to get your photo taken by Rannie, and took the opportunity to present personal quotes from our many sponsors for the project.

Constraints and Conclusions
As many of you who were at SpinTO can probably attest to, the display of these visuals didn’t quite go off without a hitch. We were limited to a projected resolution of 800×600 pixels, which I was well aware of, but didn’t realize that the way in which the projectors were setup cut off around 25-50 pixels on each side of the graphic.

This resulted in some unfortunate clipping of text that made some slides difficult to read, and I learned a valuable lesson – when designing for screens in an unusual environment, ensure the majority of the information is concentrated near the center of the screen.

Ultimately I’m really happy with how the visuals turned out at SpinTO and hope that some of the amazing facts about what the Bike Rally riders and Toronto People with AIDS Foundation accomplish in a given year were gleaned by party-goers!

You can see the full set of visuals projected at SpinTO below courtesy of Slideshare. I excluded a few that were heavy in animation since they didn’t translate well to static content:

You can also see the full-length projected version that was run on-site at the Mod Club. It’s about 15 minutes in length and runs each slide for about 15 seconds: