At all stages, be aware of the budget for your exhibit. Building your competitive exhibit is great, but it must be kept in perspective. My personal preference is to distinguish the exhibit through the level of research and knowledge involved, rather than how expensive the material is. When planning your exhibit, keep the following factors in mind. They are general by design; being too specific may force you away from that aspect of uniqueness that you need before you begin to form the exhibit within the accepted judging guidelines. Spending additional time with these items will pay off for you later when you are able to move through the "building" stage much more smoothly.

1. Know what you want to exhibit.

2. Know how to define your exhibit for the judges through the exhibit title and the title page.

3. Know how large your exhibit should be. The maximum number of pages allowed in the stamp show competition is a limiting factor; you need a solid handle on this before you build your exhibit. Then, get a feel for how much material you have that fits under the umbrella of your exhibit's title.

4. Outline your exhibit. Your exhibit is a logical story that needs to flow like a book. What sort of story are you planning to tell? When you are developing your outline, you may want to begin to lay out your exhibit pages on stock pages, which allow you the flexibility of adding, deleting and moving the material at will.

5. Be sure that you covered everything included within your exhibit title and make sure you have not included anything beyond the title's scope. Let me explain some pitfalls. Perhaps you are interested in the stamps of Bermuda and you want to build a competitive exhibit based on that interest. The first part of your planning (knowing what you want to exhibit) is under control for the moment. You then set a tentative title: no surprise, Stamps of Bermuda. That honest title is your way to explain the contents of your exhibit. To the judges, however, it suggests that you will be showing all the stamps of Bermuda, including the most valuable that may cost more than $100,000 each!

So, you need a subject that you can develop, preferably without undue expense and use titles such that you convey to the judges what they can expect and grade you against.

If the Bermuda commemorative stamps are your exhibit approach, presuming this exhibit is for a local show, you may use each of Bermuda's commemorative set titles for the year span you choose to show as a major heading. Subheadings may be any minor varieties that you have. You may also have provisions for first-day covers or examples of some/many of the stamps that were used and are still on their envelopes.