CAS: Forget the Cars, Let's Talk Displays

Auto shows are not quite known for their subtlety. Everything is loud, bright, and screaming for attention. By the end of the day, we were completely wiped out. Not simply from walking around for twelve straight hours, but just from having all of our senses continually attacked. We thought we'd take this time to kind of talk you through some of the better, or more outlandish, display design. Ford's was about the best American-made car display we saw. It occasionally dipped into gaudy terrain, but overall, it was a lot of clean lines and solid, bold colors, which not a lot of overcrowding: Jeep and Dodge on the other hand, was all-out absurd. At the opposite end of the building, they had a whole track where you could get into one of their cars and be driven around such obstacles as too much noise, gigantic cones, and simulated mountains, which is certainly of big concern here in the Midwest: Saturn was pretty standard fare, except for a small, dark structure they had built, wherein they had parts of the car being projected onto a real car by numerous projectors, making for a pretty cool setup (one that was exceedingly difficult to photograph): The Land Rover people had one of the best designed backgrounds behind the cars, utilizing this sort of hand drawn, wiggly coordinates thing: Once we wandered across the hall and got into the imports section, that's when things really picked up and started getting a lot more visually interesting, like the Mini setup: Scion had a very similar setup, which was cool and featured a batch of differently designed cars. But we felt they dropped the ball a bit by not letting us know who the individual designers were for each: Saab, by far, was the hand's down winner, display-wise. Using these screens made of very large bulbs, the backdrops were animated, but not overly so. Occasionally a person's silhouette would wander in and out, but for the most part, it was just this big display of cool, crisp, blue-ish color: Plus, there was stuff built into the glass walkways, like this display of merchandise: And one of the running themes was: if the cars aren't drawing people in, use videogames. There were loads of these Xbox units everywhere, always in some way, of course, related to their respective car company: Lastly, we saw this thing just laying over by the Dodge area. We have no idea who it belonged to. It was just sitting out there by its lonesome. May it was just advertising the general concept of 'seats.' We felt badly for it, so we took a photo:

Fishbowl

CAS: Forget the Cars, Let's Talk Displays

Steve Delahoyde

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Steve Delahoyde