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SHOW SERVICES · RIGGING · HANGING SIGNS
Nothing attaches to the building except through the venue’s riggers — and one threshold decides your entire budget. A sign under 150 lbs with no electrical components flies straight from the hoists: a low-four-figure line. Cross that line — heavier structure, lit sign, integrated AV — and you’re into truss, engineered safety points, and a bill that starts around $20,000. Here’s where the line sits — and how we design to the right side of it.
THE SEQUENCE
Rigging runs on the venue’s clock, not yours — first up before move-in, last down after move-out:
You order rigging from the show or venue’s exclusive rigging contractor: a fee per hang point, plus crew and equipment time. The order includes a rigging plot — a scaled drawing showing the sign’s size, weight, hang height, and position over your space.
This is the fork in the budget. Under roughly 150 lbs with no electrical components, the sign flies directly from the chain hoists — simple, fast, low four figures. Heavier than that, or carrying lights and powered elements, and it must hang from truss: a rented structural grid with engineered safety points, load review, more points, more crew — and a cost that changes by an order of magnitude.
Hanging signs are typically routed to the advance warehouse in clearly marked crates, because riggers fly signs before booth construction starts. A sign that arrives with your booth freight has usually missed its window.
Riggers assemble the sign on the floor, attach chain hoists to the ceiling rig points, and raise it to your approved height — checked against the show’s height limit for your booth type and location.
After the floor closes and booths come down, riggers lower the sign, and it’s repacked into its crate for the trip home — the reverse of move-in, on the same house-crew clock.
TEN-SECOND MATH
A circular fabric sign over an island booth — under 150 lbs, no electrical, so it flies from the hoists with no truss:
EXAMPLE ORDER · ADVANCE RATE
Example figures for illustration — a simple no-truss sign rig typically lands in the $3,000–$4,000 range, published per show by the rigging contractor. Cross the truss line — over ~150 lbs or any electrical in the sign — and budget $20,000–$60,000+, with complex structures going higher still.
WHERE BUDGETS GO SIDEWAYS
Rigging problems are calendar and engineering problems wearing a ceiling costume:
Rigging happens first — before the floor fills with half-built booths that a chain hoist can’t swing over. A sign that ships with your regular booth freight instead of early to the advance warehouse often can’t be flown until the floor clears, if at all.
A simple sign rig runs roughly $3,000–$4,000. Add weight past ~150 lbs or build electrical into the sign, and it now hangs from truss with engineered safety points — $20,000 to $60,000, and complex rigs go higher. Designers who don’t know where the line sits cross it by accident, one lighting fixture at a time.
Every show sets hang heights by booth type and location — and the limit at your last show is not the limit at this one. A sign built to the wrong height either flies too low to be seen over the crowd or violates the cap and doesn’t fly.
WHERE WE COME IN
The ceiling is a design constraint — so we design for it before the sign is ever built.
Your sign is designed to this show’s published height limits and your booth position — not a generic template — so what we build is what the venue will actually fly.
We produce the scaled rigging drawing the contractor needs — dimensions, weight, hang points, position over the booth — so your order is complete the day it’s submitted.
Where the concept allows, we engineer signs under 150 lbs and keep electrical out of the hung structure — lighting the sign from the booth instead — so you fly from the hoists at $3–4K instead of renting truss at $20K+. When the design genuinely needs truss, we say so in the quote, with the number attached.
Hanging signs route to the advance warehouse in marked crates on our schedule, assembled and test-hung at pre-build — so the riggers’ first look at your sign isn’t its first time together.
STILL WONDERING
No. Attaching anything to the building — signs, truss, cables, points — is exclusively the venue riggers’ work at essentially every convention facility. Your crew can assemble ground-supported elements, but the ceiling belongs to the house.
It depends almost entirely on which side of the truss line you’re on. A simple sign — under roughly 150 lbs, no electrical — flies directly from the chain hoists and typically runs $3,000–$4,000 all-in as a labeled example: hang points, hoists, and crew time for the fly and the lower. A heavy or electrified structure hangs from truss with engineered safety points, and budgets run $20,000–$60,000 or more. Every show’s rigging contractor publishes its own rates.
Because signs fly first. Riggers hang signs before booth construction fills the floor, so hanging signs route to the advance warehouse in marked crates ahead of your booth freight. Miss that window and the sign may not fly at all.
The working threshold: over roughly 150 lbs, or any electrical components in the sign — lighting, LED elements, powered AV. Either one moves you from a simple hoist fly into a truss rig with load calculations, rated engineered safety points, and sometimes stamped structural drawings. Under 150 lbs and unpowered, fabric and lightweight signs fly from the hoists directly, at a fraction of the cost.
Whatever this show’s rules say — typically a maximum height to the top of the sign, varying by booth type, size, and location, published in the exhibitor manual. It changes show to show, which is why we pull the current rules before designing, not after.
THE REST OF THE INVOICE
NO SURPRISE INVOICES
Your quote covers the sign designed to this show’s height rules, the rigging plot drawn, engineered points where the weight demands them, and the early-ship deadline already on the schedule.
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