Attending a printing trade show usually means being visually overstimulated, and this distracting effect can make it hard to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of booth design.

Subtleties? Nuances? Do these qualities stand a chance at a megashow like Print 05, where “subtlety” might mean hidden in the back with the pipe-and-drapes and “nuance” is just another way of saying that one exhibitor wrangled a better booth position than another exhibitor?

Believe it or not, low-key but high-concept messages can be conveyed by the way a trade show booth is organized—a fact that will impress alert visitors to booth #1200 at Chicago’s McCormick Place from Sept. 9 to 15. There, in 76,000 carefully planned square feet of exhibit space, Heidelberg will try to portray the kind of company it now is in the order and the arrangement of the technology it has chosen for display.