Brand Experience • Event Design • Creative Leadership
Expel RSA Conference: Turning Security Teams Into Heroes
Building an experiential booth that reframed cybersecurity partnership as something worth celebrating, not just selling.
The Expel booth on the floor of the RSA Conference, built around the “Stronger Together” and Heroes Assemble concept.
Summary
Security conferences are full of booths trying to grab attention with noise. Once the “Heroes Assemble” concept was in place, I led the creative direction and did the hands-on design work to bring it to life, turning the people who protect their companies, our customers and our own SOC team, into the heroes they actually are. I designed the full booth environment and the artwork used in the video, built as a funnel that pulled people in, gave them a reason to stay, and turned that attention into real product demos.
Role
Creative Director
Scope
Experiential Concept & Design
Hands-On Booth Design
AI-Assisted Photo Activation
Motion Graphics Direction
Swag Design
Internal Stakeholder Alignment
Company
Expel
Hero cards from the video screen. Customers on the left and right, our internal SOC and security team assembled in the center.
The Experience
At the center was an AI-powered photo booth. Attendees stepped in, had their photo taken, and walked away with a personalized hero card, complete with their name and title. We used that same process on our own SOC managers and a group of our customers ahead of the event, then projected the results on an 18-foot screen at the back of the booth. It cycled like a character reveal, our team and our customers, presented as a unified group of heroes. The screen wasn’t just decoration. It was the beacon that pulled people in from across the floor.
I also designed the full booth wrap, carrying the same elevated, cinematic feel through the physical space. We were working with the existing booth structure rather than building new, so the back wall design had to work around fixed lighting elements and a dimensional logo already in place. That meant designing the character wall and typography around the light beams instead of fighting them.
Original production artwork I created for the booth wrap, mapped to the existing structure’s fixed lighting and door placement.
Turning the Booth Into a Funnel, Not Just a Moment
The towering screen at the back was the beacon, cycling through hero cards of our SOC managers and customers to pull people in from across the floor before they even knew what the booth was.
Once someone stepped in, the AI photo booth was the centerpiece. Attendees got their photo turned into a personalized hero card with their name and title, the same treatment used on our own team and customers on the screen behind them.
But the patches were the real strategic lever. You couldn’t get one without sitting through a live product demo first. That’s where I had to hold my ground creatively. Internal pressure pushed toward heavily Expel-branded swag, the standard playbook at a security conference where every booth looks the same. I pushed back, working directly with our own cybersecurity team to figure out what they’d actually want to wear rather than what marketing assumed. That process led to eight or nine patches built around the Heroes Assemble concept with a security-community edge, funny, a little ironic, genuinely wearable past the event.
The line for hats stretched well past the booth. People were willing to sit through a demo to earn one. That’s the whole test.
A selection of the patches, built around the Heroes Assemble concept with a security-community sense of humor.