ISTE Event Design

At one of EdTech’s largest stages, ISTE, with 14,000–16,000+ attendees a year and 500 competing exhibitors, I led the entire visual system that helped IXL Learning build a presence and brand recognizable across a crowded floor, generate organic social content, and bring teachers back year after year.

IXL needed a 20×20 booth that could clearly express its brand, showcase its full product ecosystem, and create an inviting space for educators to explore and connect. My responsibility: deliver on a tight timeline, in close coordination with collaborating designers, contractors, and overseas fabrication vendors.

The 2022 booth was functional. But three structural problems became the brief for the 2023–2024 redesign, and each had a direct design answer.

Our design goal: the booth had to read clearly whether an attendee was 50 feet away or standing directly in front of a panel. We broke that into four steps, from first sketch to final fabrication.

As the main design lead on this project, I built the comprehensive art-direction brief and visual mockup for the whole team, covering all 18 panel zones (G1–G18) with color codes. It defined the creative direction, messaging hierarchy, illustration style, and exact labeling for every surface, then assigned each zone so production could hand off cleanly to our overseas fabrication vendor.

This was a two-designer collaboration. Paulina and I split the 18 panels, with color-coded G1–G18 assignments keeping ownership legible between us. I led the art direction and owned the highest brand-exposure surfaces, while Paulina executed the angled canopy and side demo walls, all designed within one IXL brand system so the booth read as a single cohesive environment from every angle.

The core creative decision: move away from Shutterstock-heavy panels toward a custom illustration-driven language. IXL spans PreK–12 across four subjects, too broad for a single image, so the illustration system communicated “joyful, personalized learning” emotionally, while messaging and live screens handled product specifics. Each 2023–2024 decision directly addressed a 2022 failure mode.

The booth experience doesn’t end when attendees walk away. The swag suite was a deliberate extension of the booth’s brand system, each item chosen and designed with the marketing strategist and me for a strategic purpose, filtered by one question:

Attendees leave carrying the booth’s brand system with them. The items most tied to the booth’s illustration system ran out fastest, and earlier each year: from end of Day 2 (2022) to mid-Day 1 (2023).

Imagine you’re standing on the busy conference floor. Experience the same instinct that cleared these counters faster every year, every item was chosen on purpose. Flip a card to reveal the spatial strategy behind it.

ISTE Live is the largest EdTech conference in the U.S. With direct counters unavailable, booth impact is measured through proxy indicators.

The redesigned booth delivered measurably stronger results across both ISTE conferences it ran at. Backed by sales-team feedback, IXL’s booth stood out remarkably among a dense field of exhibitors, demonstrating that our design strategy executed flawlessly. The bright, consistent visuals and open layout transformed the booth into a welcoming, high-traffic destination.

Looking back at 2022: with crowds stuck at the perimeter, interviews filmed against blank walls, and disconnected swag, the value of this redesign is undeniable. It was never just a visual refresh; it was an architectural fix to real spatial and brand problems that unlocked the booth’s true commercial potential.

Featured in IXL’s official post-conference posts across LinkedIn and social media, generating strong engagement. Marketing, events, and sales cited the clarity of the visual messaging and the illustration-driven system as a meaningful improvement.

The clearest signal it worked at a deeper level: IXL used the booth as the backdrop for a series of educator interview videos published on YouTube across 2023–2024, with the G11/G14 family-product panels appearing directly in frame as a designed backdrop.

ISTE is the flagship, not the whole practice. Across my years at IXL I directed event and conference design for IXL and Rosetta Stone in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, and Canada, spanning school marketing and enterprise sales, from a 20×30 show floor down to a single pop‑up banner.

Three of these stands shipped before I kept a personal archive, and the original files did not come with me. The three below are AI‑generated reconstructions I built to show what each stand carried: the layout, the messaging hierarchy, the brand logic. They are diagrams of the design, not the delivered artwork. The surviving files follow below.

One designer cannot personally draw six countries of events. The model was ownership, not authorship.

The clearest example is California. When Takeoff went through state adoption, the company needed a presence at the county Office of Education vendor fairs where districts actually evaluate curriculum. 30+ fairs, all supplied from one design program: posters, the 16pt adoption brochure, an interactive reviewer flipbook, event banners, notecards, folders, leave‑behind collateral. I kept the pre‑event invitation card and the swag concept myself.

The IXL and Rosetta Stone for Schools 10×10 asked a question a single‑brand booth never asks: how much of the space belongs to each brand. An even split read as indecision. We weighted it 70 IXL to 30 Rosetta Stone, then worked out how two logos share a surface without either one looking like a guest.

Takeoff’s whole visual system is birds. At a curriculum conference in Anaheim, marketing brought a live macaw and set it on a perch at the edge of the booth. Attendees stopped for the bird, then stayed for the demo. For one day the illustration was not a metaphor.

The Takeoff bird mailer ships flat and opens into a bird, wings pulling out from the body. That means the die line and the illustration are one drawing. Move a fold and you cut a wing in half. It ran in state editions, each one rebuilt against that state’s standards on the same die.

We took it through metallic ink and gold and silver foil sampling with the vendor, weighing each treatment against cost and shipping before committing. Special finishes look like a styling choice. They are a production decision with a budget attached.

Event work kept landing late. Vendor specs arrived weeks before a show, and the design team absorbed the gap as overtime. Treating each booth as an emergency was the real problem.

I proposed a quarterly design roadmap: collect annual plans from Curriculum, Marketing, and the Rosetta Stone and IXL conference teams, consolidate them into one view, and let the design team see the year before the year arrived. I also opened a retrospective with stakeholders on the tightest turnarounds, using the LearnTec booth as the case in point.