The Story Behind the 2025 NEXPO Award

January 7, 2026

Alex Jeongco

The theme of Designing Possible Futures guided Clearstory’s thinking to develop the 2025 NEXPO award—a collaborative process that centered on the experience of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge through the fog.

Clearstory was invited to design the NEXPO award for the 2025 SEGD Experience San Francisco Conference. This year’s theme, “Designing Possible Futures,” was top of mind as our team discussed ideas for the award. We also wanted to design something representative of our team’s collaborative approach and of San Francisco. To develop our concept, we asked our team to generate ideas and then gathered during our office’s monthly project share to exchange thoughts.

Everyone came together with sketches, decks, stories, and themes that we felt represented our city and the theme. We then analyzed the materials and grouped similar ideas together. The concepts represented our collective thoughts on what San Francisco meant to us, and the next step was to figure out how to get one of the designs made. It was important that we work with a fabrication partner that we could trust to execute our vision and could offer suggestions that aligned with the design intent. Over the years, we’ve always been excited about pushing the boundaries with WeidnerCA and have collaborated successfully on many projects together. We shared our ideas with their team and they gave us feedback about which vision they thought they would be most excited to create.

The concept that we decided to pursue highlighted the experience of seeing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge through the fog.

We were thrilled with how they turned out, and WeidnerCA did an incredible job to help us realize our vision. The final awards are remarkably similar to the conceptual renderings, and everyone in our office wishes we could make extra to take home. Clearstory is so grateful to have had the opportunity to create this artifact celebrating the NEXPO Awards for the 2025 SEGD Conference.

The 2025 SEGD NEXPO Award winners are:

Best Booth: Moss

Best Material Supplier Booth: Bitro Group

Best New Product: Doer Signs

Best Fabricator Booth: Tinkering Monkey

Best New Resource: PAM Wayfinding

Best Artisan: Andrusko Group