This project was an exciting one, as I had never designed for so much content before, and for such a large format. My client wanted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their institute by creating an exhibit of their history, told through archival photographs and text. The exhibit was shown for three months in a large public space on campus.

There were several phases: design, selection of content, and then the building of files.

I was responsible for creating several options for the visual design, color palette, and typefaces. The large format allowed for a bold design of large blocks of color. For the palette, the prevalence of black-and-white photographs led me to advocate for bold, rich colors, to contrast with the lack of color in the content. Strong colors also would attract the attention of people moving through the exhibit space. These are some of the sample designs, as well as the final palette:

For the typeface, we needed large-size titles for the panels, a midsize for panels that had introductory content, and a smaller size for captions. I produced samples with both sans and serif faces for all levels of text, to give the client several options.

We settled on Optima Bold 84pt for the titles, which is both highly legible and beautifully humanist; its stroke width variation shows up nicely at large sizes. For the midsize text, we chose Optima Bold 24/30pt, and for captions, Dante Bold 18/24pt for its readability and support for italics.

With the help of the client, I reviewed over 700 photographs and scans from the client's archives. The size of the panels allowed for roughly four to six images with captions; more would look too crowded. Over several iterations we narrowed down the choices and grouped the items into themes so that each panel would represent one aspect of the client's history or mission. We ended up with twenty-three panels, one slightly smaller panel to introduce the exhibit, and a panel of credits acknowledging all of the client's donors and supporters.

One particularly tricky panel was the client's fellowship program. I felt that a list of participants would be too text heavy, and a grid of photos would also not do enough to capture the viewer's interest. Instead, I collated the information about where fellows were from, and what subjects they studied, and represented this data with as much visual engagement as possible. For the fellows' countries, a stylized map represents both the rough distribution of the fellows across the world, and the relative size of the circles reflects the number of fellows from each country. A line chart along the bottom of the image gives the countries in alphabetical order, as an alternative view of the data. The subjects studied fell into a few major areas, so I grouped them by area and scattered them so that they look better balanced across those disciplines than they actually are.

I constructed a layout grid for the panels in order to create a consistent visual presentation across them, since they were distributed along nearly 120 feet of wallspace. There were variations depending on the size of the content and whether or not the panel had introductory text.

With both the grid and the limited color palette, it would be very clear that the panels were all part of the same exhibit, even though they were spread across a large physical space. To maximize continuity across panels, I also added the exhibit title to the top of each panel, and a logo and QR code that pointed to the client's website to the bottom.

We went through several iterations of the layout for each panel. My primary goal was to ensure that each panel was balanced, both in item placement and in color harmonization between content and backgrounds.

It was a thrill to see the exhibit mounted after so much hard work!