Gontard & Cie

Context

Gontard & Cie Group helps laboratories run on real data: benchmarking, cost control and software for lab management, built on 35 years of lab consulting. I worked with them as a design partner: a guidebook, identity elements, and rules for a team that has to fit a lot of data onto slides and make it look good.

In May 2025 they went to EuroMedLab in Brussels, the biggest European congress in clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine: thousands of delegates from over 100 countries and a huge exhibition hall full of IVD companies.

Tension

The brief was simple: screen posters for the stand. They had been to the congress before and knew the problem. A poster hall is a sea of identical layouts: dense abstracts, small charts, walls of text. Everyone is serious, and nobody stops.

And there was a second problem. The products were still in development. There were no finished interfaces, only very messy screenshots.

The idea

Treat science like breaking news. I proposed headlines written as sensations and a layout borrowed from a newspaper front page: heavy condensed type, columns, a clear hierarchy that reads from across the hall.

“TPC uncovers hidden data.” “Test chaos ends here.” “Counting every brick.” Each poster is still a real research paper, with authors, methods and results. The tabloid energy only does one job: it makes people walk up and read.

The interfaces

From the messy screenshots I rebuilt the product screens of Lab-Passport, Lab-Calculator and Lab-Avatar as clean, readable UI. On the posters they show what the tools actually do. Later they became the basis for building the real interfaces inside the products.

Result

Three posters worked as one campaign, and the headlines pulled people to the stand. The UI I designed for the posters went on to shape the products themselves.