Event tech
Your event screen is not a giant phone
The web page on your plenary screen was built for a hand at reading distance. Mostafa Mohsen argues the stage deserves a render of its own.
alk into a plenary room
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20 minutes before doors and look at what is on the screen. Usually it is a web page: the agenda, the sponsor wall, the registration QR. And usually that page was designed by someone holding it in one hand.
A phone layout carries three assumptions. A room breaks all three.
The first is that the viewer can scroll. On a stage nobody scrolls, so anything below the fold does not exist for the length of the session. I keep finding holding screens where the only things visible at venue resolution are a logo and a headline, with the times, room names and Wi-Fi code parked two thumb-flicks down.
The second is that the viewer is 30 centimetres away. In row 20 they are 30 metres away, and the surface is often not a screen. A projector cannot make the screen darker than the room
Mostafa Mohsen
already is, so a dark design collapses towards grey the moment house lights come up, and text at a contrast ratio that passes WCAG AA on a laptop stops being readable. That 4.5:1 minimum assumes a display at reading distance. It says nothing about a projector in a lit hall. The third is that the viewer can tap. Anything that only exists after an interaction, an accordion, a tab, a‘ read more’, is not on the screen. It is in the document and invisible.
“ I keep finding holding screens where the only things visible at venue resolution are a logo and a headline, with the times, room names and Wi-Fi code parked two thumb-flicks down”
The fix is not zoom. Browser zoom changes the viewport width the page believes it has, re-triggers your breakpoints, and hands you a wider phone layout, not a stage one.
What works is a presentation render: same content, same address, a different mode the operator selects. It gets its own type scale, no content behind a tap, no dependence on scroll, and a fixed height rather than a flowing one. It costs about a day and removes a category of surprise on show day.
One defect earns its own warning. A time range written 9:00-17:00 inside an Arabic layout displays as 17:00-9:00, because the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm treats the hyphen as neutral and resolves it in the surrounding direction. The algorithm is working correctly and no styling fixes it. On a six-metre screen in front of an Arabic-speaking audience it is the most expensive typo available to you.
Three checks before your next event, none needing a developer.
Get the exact pixel dimensions and aspect ratio of every surface into the tech spec in writing.‘ A big screen’ is not a dimension.
Open the site on the venue machine, at venue resolution, in the light the session will run in, not on your laptop in an office.
Scan every projected QR from the back row, under show lighting, on a phone that has never seen the link. A screenshot review cannot read a QR code, and a logo overlay or a quiet zone eaten by a background image is enough on its own to kill it at distance.
None of this is about better slides. The screen at the front of the room is a second medium with its own constraints. Give it a design of its own instead of a magnified copy of one built for a pocket. EW n Mostafa Mohsen Abdelaziz is co-founder of Scaanme, a bilingual Arabic and English digital identity platform based in Amman, Jordan. scaanme. com www. exhibitionworld. co. uk Issue 5 2026 53