Trade Show Global Guideline
A global trade show design system for CLAAS, built around the strategic problem of putting digital products on eye-level with the agricultural machines that have always dominated the floor.
CLAAS sells two things that don't show up at trade shows the same way. The physical machines — combine harvesters, tractors, forage harvesters — are large, photogenic and easy to make central. The digital products — CEMOS, CEMIS, CLAAS Connect, EASY (Efficient Agriculture Systems) — are software, and software on a trade show floor tends to disappear behind hardware that towers over it.
The brief was a global guideline that would unify CLAAS's trade show presence across markets and solve that imbalance: digital and physical solutions on the same visual footing, in the same room, in front of the same farmer. The work landed in 2022, the year European fairs and events were ramping back up after Corona — the guideline had to work for that uneven recovery as much as for steady-state rollout.
The visual language starts from where the customer starts. A single perspective lane runs through a field, marked in CLAAS seed green. White lines attach to that lane, duplicate it in a second perspective, and connect upward to the cloud. The agricultural ground and the digital layer are drawn as one continuous system — the same lines running across the same image. Anyone in CLAAS's customer base recognises the field before they recognise the data.
The Smart Area is where that idea takes physical form. A central zone between the machines, defined by satin-matte dark grey flooring below and a low ceiling truss above, sized so it reads as a room within the booth rather than a side attraction. The Smart Area hosts the digital story — the EASY experiences (a separate Luxoom project that makes the EASY system tangible on the floor), customer-benefit messaging, the interactive product touchpoints — and is positioned so visitors can't move between machines without passing through it. The hierarchy on every CLAAS floor is now: machines around, digital at the centre.
Hanging banners do the visual stitching. Each banner is double-sided printed on transparent foil, layered so rotation around the element reveals both layers and the print shows through from behind. The effect is three-dimensional rather than flat: the banners read as objects in the space, not signs on it, which lets them connect machines and Smart Area without dividing the room. The top of every banner carries either the "Hard Work. Smartly Done." claim or a machine-category icon — never both, never anything else.
The messaging system runs in three tiers. "Hard Work. Smartly Done." stays as CLAAS's top-level claim. "Smart because…" — completed in local language at each market, "Smart weil…" in German, and so on — operates as the second-tier line, paired with one specific benefit per machine or solution. EASY experiences carry the deepest layer, interactive and in-depth. A visitor walking past gets the claim; a visitor pausing gets the benefit; a visitor engaging gets the experience. The system is built to be read at three different attention levels without requiring any of them.
Scalability sits inside the guideline rather than as an afterthought. The full system is specified for A-shows — the largest international fairs — with the ceiling truss and flooring mandatory. Smaller events can reduce the configuration without losing coherence: the same visual language, fewer elements, same recognisable CLAAS. The guideline is explicit that matching the look and feel is the spirit, not deploying every component every time.
The guideline is now CLAAS's global trade show standard, in continuous deployment across international fairs and smaller market events since 2022. Every CLAAS booth — regardless of market or scale — works from the same design system, with the Smart Area, hanging banner network and three-tier messaging behaving consistently across continents. The structural outcome is the one farmers see at the booth: digital products no longer compete with the machines for attention. They share the room with them.
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