The Book is Dead
Exhibition Design
A semester-long project spent curating and designing a rare books exhibition. We selected books that we found in general circulation at the NCSU library and attempted to tell their stories and express the continued relevancy of printed material in today's digital world.
We designed exhibition collateral, including posters, labels, and protective bonnets using experimental and intentionally unfamiliar techniques, and then worked as a class to develop a cohesive exhibition. Featured on Design Observer and selected for inclusion in Raleigh's SparkCon 2010 Design Spark.
Kit of Parts
A key part of the studio was to develop new techniques for creating imagery, signage, etc. As we created these artifacts we gathered them into a "kit of parts." Much of the imagery and techniques used to create the final exhibition artifacts were pulled from this kit. You can view the kit in its entirety here. I've also pulled out some of my favorite explorations below.
With this exploration, I made a plexiglass label that would be mounted over a printout of the book in the exhibition. The letters and bug silhouette were laser cut and then removed using an X-Acto.
For the final exhibition, I designed a plexiglass bonnet that would protect the book. This is a paper model I created to check that all the geometry I had calculated for the six sides would work.
Posters
This was the main poster I designed for the exhibition. It highlights the plentiful errors that appeared in the book I selected. Each of the butterflies was cut from a real book on a bandsaw and pinned to the poster in the same way you would pin a specimen to a page.
This large banner was mounted outside the exhibition and was used to attract the interest of people passing by. It was created by compositing some of the images I created for my kit of parts.
Exhibition Photographs
