Padlet’s Booth At ISTE 2026

About Padlet

Padlet creates fun and creative tools for classroom collaboration between teachers and students. The company is well established in the edtech field and has been a regular participant at ISTE for many years. Their approach to booth design has always been about unique visuals, human craftsmanship, and standing out.

For this year's event, they wanted to update their backdrop and commissioned me to work on the new illustration.

My Role

My goal was to design a new unique backdrop illustration that would align with Padlet's signature illustration style and outperform its predecessor. In outdoing the predecessor, I was also outdoing my own design.

Between 2021 and 2025, I worked as a Senior Illustrator at Padlet. I developed their illustration style and designed booth backdrops that the company has been using for the past several years. My personal challenge was to still make it look very padlet-y, instantly recognizable, but better.

Concept and Design

The goal for the previous design was to create a happy-looking illustration with a lot going on. A combination of things that make people happy, from food objects to animals and architecture, and make it random. This time, we wanted to keep the "a lot going on and happy feel", but make it more intentional.

The new scene takes place in a high-tech forest where animals embrace very human activities. Doing laundry in a washing machine by a lake, playing football, running a book club, and even cosplaying The Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet.

The composition is full of unexpected characters and references to literature, music, pop culture, and technology. We wanted it to be not just interesting to look at, but a scavenger hunt for everyone who stops by the booth.

I call this a "nature booth" because one of the design goals was to make the booth predominantly green which would differ from the previous predominantly pink design. Green is a soothing color family that allows for a lot of room to play with other colors that sit against it.

This 20x10 ft illustration first emerged as a Procreate sketch, then was outlined in Affinity Designer, and colored in Adobe Illustrator. From start to finish it took me four months.