CES
Activating the world’s most powerful tech event
CES is the premier technology event of the year—the only trade show that unites the entire tech landscape at once. Since 1967, CES has been the launchpad for groundbreaking technologies from personal computers to artificial intelligence.
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA)—the force behind CES—brought us on to reimagine the CES website reflecting the importance of the event and CTA’s role in it—driving attendance as well as increasing year-round engagement with their vast library of content.
To achieve this, we rooted our strategy in the unique needs of CES’s audiences as they move through stages of the year—moving from making the decision to attend, to planning their trip, to engaging post-event. Our goal was to transform the website from a static receptacle of disposable content to a platform that balances timely event-specific content with evergreen, editorial, SEO-driven content to drive continuous user engagement.
CES has many distinct user groups (attendees, exhibitors, media, and more). A core requirement of the redesign was to ensure we could provide the right content to the right user at the right time. To meet this need, we tested various navigation options with users—ultimately recognizing the importance of creating clearly identified user-based entry points. The result is a site architecture that creates clear zones for each group, organizing content by “attend” and “exhibit”—allowing users to quickly flow into only content relevant to them. The visual design reinforces this structure, signaling users with distinct color themes for pages within those two sections.
The lifecycle of CES changes significantly throughout the year. To ensure the website could flexibly change along with it we needed to identify how user engagement changes over time and design to meet these modes. We crafted an experience that moves a user from conversion mode (expressive, media-rich marketing pages) to planning mode (uncluttered, easily scannable detail pages) to post-event engagement mode (immersive, image-driven editorial pages). Focusing on the changing modes enabled us to create experiences that are purpose-built for how users engage over the event’s lifecycle.
“The new CES.tech website cements our position as the must-attend technology event of the year, where the world’s largest technology brands unveil what’s next. AREA 17 created a digital platform that not only supports the event itself, but encourages year-round engagement with our incredible wealth of previously inaccessible content. We went from an experience that no longer fit our needs to a completely overhauled UX and technology stack that modernizes our brand and sets us up for long-term success.” — Kinsey Fabrizio, President at Consumer Technology Association
The Consumer Technology Association is the organization behind CES and is a powerful trade association in its own right, producing proprietary research and advocating for the industry on Capitol Hill. Despite this, CTA lacks brand awareness—even amongst CES attendees and exhibitors. A goal of the project was to elevate the role of CTA on the CES website, highlighting its expertise and thought leadership. To do so, we created a global header that establishes CTA as the force behind CES with paths for users to explore more. We also created CTA-specific modules which provide the opportunity to highlight a particular expert, piece of research, or advocacy effort.
Early in the design process, we collaborated with CTA and their branding agency, TRIPTK, as they developed a refreshed logo and identity for CTA/CES that symbolizes the relationship between technology and humanity. Our work on the CES website advanced this work into digital—including by using Monument Grotesk Semi-Mono for a tech-forward typographic accent and applying a robust color system to provide wayfinding for users. The website’s rounded card language offers a warm, inviting balance to the sharp typography and precise, dense layouts.
