Brand New Worlds: Exhibition Design
In this assignment, the book Graphic Design: Now in Production was used as a reference for which to base the design of an exhibition. Our group, consisting of Andrew, Raven, Skye, and I, got together to first decide on an article, and then to toss around ideas of how we were going to go about execute a number of deliverables in response to our reading. These deliverables include a printed A0 poster, wall plaque, video, and book.
Brand New Worlds by Andrew Blauvelt is a meaty article that talks about a lot of different concepts. It gave us the history of logos and corporate identity, offered a series of logo redesigns, and discussed heraldry among other topics. What excited us were logos. There are thousands of them out there, and yet they are constantly being redesigned or updated to fit in with different societal views or to align with changed company missions. We first looked at logo redesigns and tried to find a way to pull an interested concept out of changed designs over time. In the end we found that direction would have lead to a project that was more research based than we would have liked. We tried something else, and compiled a collection of local and global logos to match with the letters of the alphabet.
From this point we realized that re-contextualizing logos to create their own typeface would be a great way to bring these marks into a new space. With global logos, they are often easily recognizable simply because of the large influence they have. Their logos are printed everywhere, and we as people, are forced to view them. By taking familiar logos and bringing them into a different space we hoped that we would be able to offer our audience a new way to see something well known. We called this typeface LogoType.
Creating LogoType was a feat in and of itself, simply because of the editing that had to be made in a font creating software called Glyphs. Each shape had to be adjusted, tweaked, and edited, so that shapes resembled the logos they were pulled from. When that was done, tracking was adjusted so that the shapes read well together, punctuation was added, and the file was exported as a .oft, a downloadable typeface.
Once the typeface was finalized, our next course of action was to create a poster, video, and book, implementing it. For the poster, we decided we needed a way to show off our typeface. The poster highlighted our type specimen. We included both uppercase and lowercase letters, a detailed shot of one of the letters, and a section of Andrew Blauvelt’s article typed out in Logotype.
For the book, we treated it as an in-depth view of our creation of the typeface in Glyphs. It is organized in the order we went about creating the typeface and explores the program, ultimately giving the viewer a window into our process.
The idea for the video was something that we came up with right away. We knew we wanted to bring the narrative back to the reading, so we used the video talk of Brand New Worlds and used our typeface to serve as the video’s subtitles. This enabled us to have viewers engage with, and try to de-code, LogoType into something they could understand.
Taking this idea a step further, we decided to include another element of interaction by spelling out phrases in LogoType and applying them to a wall in our exhibition space. This allowed us to activate a wall that wasn’t necessarily part of our space, and connect our design over two walls.
The following images show our deliverables in the gallery space.
Thanks for reading!
