I’m in Las Vegas for the next few days to visit Exhibitor 2012 – a trade show for the museum and exhibit design industry. My website is a blog of my projects, so I added this post with some of my favorite exhibit-related projects for any interested folks from the show that visit my site.

Coney Island Disaster!
I designed this event to appear to be a giant squid crashing towards the Coney Island Boardwalk. It needed to be bold to compete with the ferris wheel, roller coaster, and sideshow.

Funnel Cake Exhibit
This exhibit was designed to give visitors a sense of what funnel cake was like, without serving any funnel cake on premesis. (funnel cake is a fun, messy, twisty pile of dough and sugar.)

Bread Clip Lamp
I made this lamp for a project at FIT. The shade is built up of hundreds of clips from bread bags, with the arrangement designed to give a bit of a gradient from the top to bottom of the shade. I really like the shadows that the lamp creates!

Puppet Stage for Miss Piggy
This stage was made for an event featuring an appearance by Miss Piggy. It was constructed to knock-down quickly so that the setup could be very fast.

Balancing Rock Pedestals for DeBeers
I made these pedestals out from faux rocks I carved from foam. They are connected by steel rods, which give them the appearance of a balancing act.

This year I worked with the lovely Mirella Toncheva to make a Valentine. She’s a total babe!

Some past Valentines are over here:
http://willkrause.com/2010/02/14/happy-valentines-day/
http://willkrause.com/2010/01/12/yearly-valentines-2004-2009/

I needed to make a last-minute Halloween costume, so I glued together this mask from an old cardboard box, feathers leftover from a stork puppet I made a while back, and some felt, pipe cleaners, and – of course – a handful of plastic googly eyes.

I modified two trash cans with seats and little wheels so that they could compete in a slow and sneaky race in Central Park.

This prop was used in an Australian show called “Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year.”

I made this giant baby carriage so that a grownup could fit inside. It uses heavyweight plywood, BMX wheels, and welded steel to support a big person. Katie Akana and Jessie Voris handled the fabric and upholstery, And Katie also served as test pilot for a race down the hallway of the woodshop.

This prop was used in an Australian show called “Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year.”

I designed this lamp for a weather-themed lighting scheme for a FIT project set in the Brooklyn Childrens’ Museum. The idea of the lighting scheme is that lighting would be used to show weather changes – projectors would show animated clouds, and lightning would be simulated with strobe lights, among other effects. After the thunder and lightning passed through the space, this rainbow lamp would light up as sunlight returned to the space. The rainbow effect is created by shining light through a spectrum-gradient printed transparency, which lights acrylic rods. The rods are cut to different lengths so that different colors appear as bands at different heights.

Sometimes I’m called on to create classy drawings for Polo-Ralph Lauren. Here are some panels from two different storyboarding projects – one for a commercial, and the other for an instructional video about decorative painting.

Earthbound farm is a giant grower of organic foods, so for this FIT exhibit design project, I created a display with a giant display that is part farm tractor, part tractor trailer, and part shopping cart, to emphasize the connections between the farm, shipping, and the grocery store. The various displays also emphasize connections – between the grocers attending the conference and between the company and the grocers.

I was part of a group of FIT students to redesign the lobby and second floor gallery at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. One of the big challenges was that the Introduction to Himalayan Art exhibit on the second floor has two different entrances, each with two ways to start going through the exhibit. My plan was to create dividers to lead visitors through the content in the proper sequence.

I fabricated these two counters for Kikkerland’s 2012 trade shows. They both have lightbox faces made out of acrylic covered with adhesive vinyl. The client wanted the acrylic to go all the way to the edge of the counter, so the plastic was applied before the laminate, and then the laminate was applied over the edge. One of the counters has a top design to hold a computer. I built these counters for Abunch LLC.