The right lighting can make all the difference in whether your display shines. Whether you’re marketing your business at a trade show, exhibition or conference or creating retail displays for your store, SpeedPro can help you find all the portable display lighting you need.
What Is a Portable Lighting Display?
Lighting for portable displays consists of various light sources that can be configured to help illuminate, highlight and even color the setup. These lights come in different forms. Some exhibition lights are at the end of a step and clip onto the tops of your displays to shine a light down on them. Others sit on the floor or tabletop and can be angled to shed light on whatever you want.
Whether your display consists of retractable banner stands, tabletop displays or any other type of graphic, you don’t want it to fall flat because it’s dimly lit. The best portable lighting display consists of all the lights you need to help your display pop. At a trade show or exhibition, this element can help your booth or table rise above the competition and feel more inviting to attendees.
Benefits of Portable Display Lighting
Choosing the right lighting for your event should never be an afterthought. Portable display lighting plays a significant role in an overall display, delivering three primary advantages:
- Providing general illumination: Perhaps the most obvious reason to have portable event lighting is to help illuminate your booth or display table so that attendees can see all your displays and information clearly, even if the venue isn’t well-lit. General illumination is important if you want to make sure your display is bright and visible, especially if you know the lighting in your venue is inadequate on its own.
- Setting the mood: General illumination isn’t the only reason for using portable lighting. Bringing your own lighting to events also gives you more control over the atmosphere in your booth. If you want to set a certain mood in your booth, lighting is one of the best means of achieving it. You can manipulate the mood with the amount of light, the placement of lights and the color you select.
- Highlighting focal points: Lighting is also an effective way of drawing attention to certain features in your display. An extra dose of lighting on these special features will help them pop from their background. Giving trade show attendees a focal point or a couple of focal points will help direct their attention to the most critical aspects of your display so that they don’t wander past, unsure of where to look.
Types of Portable Lighting
SpeedPro offers several different types of portable lighting that you may want to incorporate into your next display. In many cases, you’ll want to take advantage of different lighting types to create a truly eye-catching display.
1. Floodlights
Rather than casting a concentrated stream of light, floodlights are designed to illuminate a larger area. They’re an excellent option when you’re trying to brighten up your whole display or event booth. You can purchase floodlights in a slimline model or as accent lights. Accent floodlights are available in various colors as well — no matter what look you’re going for, if you need a lot of light, you can come up with the perfect configuration of flood display lights.
2. Spotlights
When you’re watching a play, even when there are multiple actors on stage, your focus likely stays wherever the spotlight is. The same concept applies to your display. Spotlights provide a narrow, concentrated beam of light to highlight important features in your display. These lights can add drama and intrigue to your setup, encouraging passersby or visitors of your exhibition space to pay close attention.
3. Slimline Lights
Slimline lights come in various types, including floodlights, spotlights and more. These lights are mounted onto the end of a stem, which allows you to position them exactly where you want them to illuminate displays from the top down. Retractable banner stand displays are a popular and effective way of showing off your branding or crucial information, and you can connect a slimline display light directly to your banner stand, which will allow these displays to pop.
4. Accent Lights
Accent lights are the perfect tools to help you achieve the right mood in your booth. These lights come in various sizes and colors, so can choose one option you like or combine different accent lights throughout your booth to create your desired effect. For example, you may want to shed light on a graphic of your logo in the center of your booth. Why not pump up the color by adding an accent light in a hue that matches your logo? You can create eye-catching visual displays with these color accents.
Why LED Lighting Is Always the Way to Go
If you look through our catalog of portable lighting options from SpeedPro, you’ll notice that all of our lights have something in common: They use LED bulbs. LED stands for light emitting diode. We offer only LED lighting because it has some unmistakable advantages over traditional incandescent lighting. Here are a few of the benefits you’ll experience when you use LED lighting in your displays:
- Energy efficiency: One of the biggest advantages of LED lighting is that it uses far less energy — as in at least 75% less — than incandescent lighting. This energy efficiency will translate directly into savings on your utility bill, which is a major plus if you’re using portable display lighting in your own facility.
- Longevity: LED lights also last longer. Unlike incandescent lighting and compact fluorescent lighting (CFL), LEDs rarely burn out. Instead, they slowly become dimmer over time. An LED’s predicted lifetime is based on when the light output is expected to be 30 percent below the level of brightness it started out with.
- Compactness: Another advantage of LED lights is that they come in small packages. You would need a much larger light to match the same brightness of a compact LED light. This feature is an important advantage for portable exhibition lighting since you want lights that are easy to transport and set up and don’t look clunky or get in the way of the rest of your display.
- Temperature: When you’re in an event hall full of people, you want lighting that can effectively illuminate your displays without putting off heat and making your staff and visitors uncomfortable. Unlike incandescent bulbs and CFLs, which release 90% and 80% of their energy as heat, LED lights stay relatively cool to the touch and won’t heat up your booth.
- Concentration: LEDs are also designed to provide light in a more concentrated manner than other lighting. Other lights have to reflect light to point it in the right direction, and they end up losing some of the light. LEDs, on the other hand, effectively shine light in a specific direction, making them more efficient. That’s why they can seem just as bright using a fraction of the wattage of other lights.
How to Choose the Right Lighting for Your Event
If you’re not sure how to choose the right lights for your upcoming event, ask yourself the following four questions.
1. What Is the Venue Lighting Like?
First, you’ll want to find out what sort of lighting you’ll have to work with at your event venue. Trade shows, expos and other large-scale events are typically held in large spaces with suboptimal lighting.
Part of the issue is that gymnasiums and conference halls often have few or no windows to let in natural light, so all the light they have to offer is in the form of overhead lights that can only do so much to illuminate such a large, open area. This type of lighting may be sufficient for a concert, reception or other events that might take place in the space at other times.
However, for a trade show or exhibition, where people want to be able to see each booth clearly and even read information, it can seem dark. If you’re going to present in a venue like this, you should plan to supply plenty of lighting. If other booths fail to do the same, your booth will stand out as a bright spot in an otherwise dimly lit facility.
If you’re investing in lighting that you plan to use at multiple events in the future, consider these different venues and plan to have enough of your own lighting to create a well-lit booth in the dimmest venue you plan to exhibit in.
2. What Sort of Mood Do You Want to Cultivate?
Lighting is more than just a practical element of your display. It plays a powerful role in influencing people’s moods, so you should always ask yourself what sort of mood you want to cultivate at your booth.
People tend to focus on mood lighting in their own home. For instance, at a dinner party, you may want to have lower lighting for a more intimate and relaxing feel. However, the concept of mood lighting applies no matter where you are. Consider what sort of mood you’d like to promote at your exhibition booth.
If you want an energetic feel, bright lighting is best. If you want a more dramatic or intimate vibe, you may want to keep it a bit dimmer. This preference doesn’t mean you don’t need supplemental lighting, however. It simply means you may want to opt for more localized lighting to illuminate certain areas while leaving other areas a bit darker. Spotlights are a great option in such a case.
You may also want to consider colored lights if the mood you want to cultivate is more of a fun one. Colored lights can help you create a party-like atmosphere. They can also help you promote certain emotions. For example, yellow tends to be associated with energy and happiness, while red is associated with passion or a sense of alarm. Whatever atmosphere you’re going for, consider how the level of brightness and types of lights you use can help you achieve it.
3. Do You Want Your Booth to Feel Warm or Cool?
Another consideration that has to do with setting the atmosphere at your booth is whether you want people to see your booth — and, in turn, your company — as warm and traditional or cool and ultramodern. There’s no right or better answer here — it all depends on your business.
Your answer to this question should dictate whether you opt for a warm or cool white light. The difference may seem like a subtle one, but it can be a determining factor in setting the tone at your booth.
Generally, if you want your booth to feel warmer to visitors, you should use warm white lighting. This type of lighting is more traditional, and it will give a creamy glow to everything in your booth, which is likely to make visitors feel welcome and at ease. If your company has an emphasis on hospitality or working with people, you may want to consider warm white lighting.
On the other hand, if you want to emphasize that your company is high-tech, ultramodern or cutting-edge, you may be better off to go with cool white lighting. Cooler lighting is a newer development in the world of lighting, and it can highlight the fact that your company embraces innovation over tradition.
4. Do You Have Any Specific Areas or Displays You Want to Highlight?
Finally, ask yourself whether you have a centerpiece or a few different displays you want to draw attention to. If not, you’ll probably want to stick with lighting solutions that illuminate your whole booth evenly, such as floodlights.
If you want to highlight certain spaces, you should consider purchasing spotlights or strip lights. These more localized lighting options are especially important if you want to create mood lighting in your booth, leaving other areas dimmer. This configuration will work especially well if you want to draw rapt attention to a certain area or areas.
What sorts of spaces should you consider highlighting? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- A large graphic of your logo at the back of your booth
- A prototype of a new product you’re launching
- A graphic that includes powerful statistics to hook the interest of passersby
- A platform or area where you’ll have periodic or ongoing demonstrations
- A table with portfolios, pamphlets or sign-up sheets
Consider what parts of your booth you want to emphasize, then make it visually clear that these areas are especially important.
Find the Portable Display Lighting You Need From SpeedPro
For all your portable display lighting needs, turn to SpeedPro. We’re a leading supplier of large-format graphics, and we provide the tools you need to make these graphics truly shine. If you want to grab your audience’s attention at your next trade show or other event, make sure you have the right portable display lighting ready to go.
To see how SpeedPro can help with all of your display needs, find a studio near you today and let our designers help you create eye-catching visuals that shed light on what makes your business unique.
