Manufacturing custom event tents in-house goes beyond fabricating metals and sewing canopies — it also includes laying out and even designing the artwork that ultimately goes on your canopy and sidewalls.
Many brands come to us with a design already in mind, which is totally fine. Our art team retrofits that design to our templates and readies it for print and production. Most of the time, we can turn around a custom tent in as little as three days.
But there are also times when a customer — from a brewery to a water bottle company — isn’t sure what they want on their tent. All they may have is a logo but not other ideas.
That’s where the TentCraft art team can help.
A huge value-add of working with TentCraft is our expert art team. We can take your logo (and help you understand vector vs. raster!), take a peek at your website and social media profiles, and come up with a tent that fits your brand to a tee.
Obviously, it’s not always that easy.
“The most common issue we encounter with artist choice is the client doesn’t know what they want to begin with, so we design a tent without any direction and the client comes back wanting the opposite of what we did,” said Forrest Hanson, TentCraft’s Art Team Lead. “Artist choice is a great option that TentCraft provides, but the customer should know they can literally get anything back if there's no direction.”
5 Tips to Design the Best Artist Choice Custom Tent
Here are some tips to make the most of your artist choice tent experience.
What’s the goal?
This is a question you should answer at the very beginning. Do you need your tent to stand out? Or is this tent going to be tucked away at an event and primarily used for storage. Maybe you’re serving food and drinks, which allows us to not only design your canopy, but potentially offer suggestions for add-ons, like media walls or counters.
Know Your Colors and Text
The easiest starting point for your tent is knowing what colors should be included and what’s the specific text — if any — on the valance or one of the four panels. Sometimes brands just want their logo; other times, they want a slogan, too. When that’s the case, it’s also a good opportunity to find out if your brand uses a specific font.
Seek Out Inspiration
If you have absolutely no idea what you want your tent to look like, it’s time to start looking at tents we’ve created in the past. A good starting spot is a blog on our favorite artist choice tents. Also make sure to check out our…
Customers can also browse Adobe Stock for backgrounds and images they like. We have a license and can use any of those photos.
Determine Your Energy
Have you thought about the type of energy your brand puts off? Is it serious? Playful? Eccentric?
“Helping us understand your energy lets us know how mild or wild you want your design to be,” said Hanson.
Bush's Beans, for example, chose to have a very playful energy with their tent setup at the World Championship of Chili in 2021.
Volkswagon, on the other hand, went much simpler with a small logo, flatroof design, and an informative backwall.
Wait a Day or Two
Our final and, perhaps, most important tip is to wait at least a day or two when you receive your first draft back.
“Even if you don’t like it, that day or two allows you to really think about what you don’t like, what you like — and then you can come back to us with more specific changes,” said Hanson.
Making incremental changes right away can result in too many artist revisions. It can save you and the art team a lot of time by really thinking about what you want your tent to look like.
Start Your Custom Tent
What are you waiting for? Now that you know how to best use the TentCraft art team, it’s time to get to work! Drop our team a line and let them know what you’re looking for in a tent.
