Industry
Cybersecurity
Client
XBOW
Black Hat 2026
“They took a simple identity and made it feel big without turning it into visual noise.”
Sean Ferguson — on XBOW’s booth, named top branded booth of the show
A 30×30 Booth That Had to Earn Its Spot
Black Hat is where the security industry goes to be impressed. A top-tier sponsorship comes with a 30×30 footprint on the floor, and a booth that size takes a lot of branding. There were two of us designing it. XBOW’s customers and its own engineers came up through the old-school hacker world, so instead of reaching for the clean enterprise-software look most of the floor was already wearing, we leaned all the way into where our people actually came from. We called it Hack the Planet.
Booth Footprint
30 × 30
Design Team
2 designers
Design Timeframe
3 weeks
My Role
Motion Design & Brand Design
Finding the Niche Our People Already Loved
Leaning in meant hunting for the specific old things our audience is genuinely nostalgic about. That became the foundation: glitch, monospaced type, interfaces that look like they boot rather than load. We cut it with street and skate culture. The mix is what kept it from reading as a costume. It felt like something made by people who were there, not a theme rented for four days.
One Room, Built Once and Used Everywhere
I built a complete room in 3D that included old-school computers, period-correct clutter, the XBOW logo illuminated on the back wall. It started as artwork for the LED, but once the environment existed it became the most useful asset we had. Need a social post? Drop a Game Boy on the desk and re-render. Need a new in-event graphic? Change the animation on the monitors and pull a different camera angle. With two designers and three weeks, that reuse is the only reason the volume was possible. And because every asset came out of the same room, the whole thing held together instead of looking like a pile of separate deliverables.
The 25-Foot LED Loop
One minute, running the full length of the conference. Abstract old-school UI animation, 3D scenes from the room, and enough variation that someone standing in the booth for ten minutes never watched the same beat twice. At forty feet it was the first thing you saw walking the aisle, which meant it had to carry the brand on its own before anyone got close enough to read a word.
Swag People Actually Kept
I worked closely with our creative director on the giveaway line. The skate deck was the anchor, and it only works because the art direction had made it possible. Stickers do what stickers have always done in this community, they end up on laptops at the next conference. Except this time there was such an external demand from customers, we are setting up a shop to get these year-round. Nothing here was a branded pen.
What Two Designers Got Onto That Floor
The booth ended up being one of the strangest and most specific on the floor — a working hacking museum and payphones visitors could actually pick up and hack. Those were another teammate’s idea and he ran with them; my part was making sure everything around them looked like it came from the same place. Thousands of scans later, and with a show full of booths that cost considerably more, ours got named the best-branded on the floor. For a two-person design team on a three-week timeline, that is the outcome we were chasing.
