My first major project at SPACElogic was Sneakertopia at ArtScience Museum, so credits to them for the build and all the wonderful photos, and of course to the respective artists for all the artworks shown here.
What a trip! I learned so much, having been working there for about seven months at the time of its opening. From what I've heard, this has been one of the smoother sailing exhibitions, and I'm so glad that I was a part of it.
The Entrance
Sneaker Storyboard by David Kaul, tobyato sneaker stone lions by tobyato
Now, with a museum project like this, the temptation from friends and family is to ask what I did. By now I should be able to talk about what I do for a living, but it's hard when they ask if you did the drawings that, no, actually...
For example, the illustrations on the walls of the entrance gallery was done by David Kaul. We received the working file, with all the individual icons separated, and I was tasked with laying them all out on the walls, covering them like the original site in LA. It's not as easy as it sounds!
With walls these big, it's a tricky thing to get the images to cover all that space, while also being mindful of the different elements (TV, introduction text, exhibition logo, artwork labels) that had to be placed on the wall. Not to mention that the walls were an odd shape, and we had to take into account electrical sockets, service panels, and doors that would interfere with the wall sticker, which in this case was an artwork in itself.
There's a lot of thought that goes into layout in flat 2D graphic design yes, but in spatial design even more so!
The placement of the logo in the middle wall was chosen at a very tall height so that it would not be obstructed by tobyato's Stone Lions. The oversized wordmark on the right wall was my idea, as I thought the extremely long horizontal wall would be a good place to showcase it. It would make for a pretty good photo-op as well as emphasise the boldness of their branding.
Actually, I was very thankful that Sneakertopia had an existing branding, and a pretty straightforward one at that—black, white, Gotham, Montserrat... love it.
Chapter Introductions
I feel like I've been saying 'wall' a lot. Maybe I'll start saying 'surface' instead.
Having a strong branding helps a lot, but there are still about twenty different ways text can be placed on a wall. Black and white could also be used in any different combination of graphic patterns. Something to keep in mind, though, was for each design to be adaptable to every gallery. In the end we settled for this clean white wall, with a black strip to highlight (can you highlight if you're a dark colour?) the shoe display case.
Artwork Labels
Another thing we had to design were the artwork labels. Artwork labels, man. Who reads them? Well, I had to. For every piece of artwork, including the music soundtrack that was playing throughout the gallery, there had to be a label. It makes sense, of course, it's a museum still, and of course we'd want to give proper credit to all the artists who contributed to this exhibition.
Still, we went through a lot of different iterations for this design. The cool thing is that this was actually printed on canvas and mounted on a substrate, so there was a texture to it. I don't have a picture of it at this moment unfortunately, since this isn't the sort of thing people really take pictures of. We're still really proud of it though :)
Once we got the design for a standard label done, we expanded it for the different contents we were provided:
I hope people read this. Actually, please read it now.
Frugal
I remember staying quite late at the office on a Friday night because of this room, specifically the floor... it had to be just right.
All the money here are Frugal dollar bills, and we had to go through a few rounds of test printing to get to a point where we were happy with it. The bills on the floor were printed directly on the floor sticker, but the ones hanging from the ceiling and piled in the bathtub were done by an external printer. That was one of the few things we didn't do in-house, but we still did the FAs for those.
Kudos to the poor project manager who had to bend and twist all of them to get that perfect effortless flying look, though!
Retail Space
One of the designs I was proudest of was in the retail space. Unfortunately it's quite an unassuming piece of furniture, so I don't have a picture of it besides one I took with myself. I do have a mockup I did in Illustrator, though, and that's pretty much the next best thing.
Oh, why not. Here's that photo of me with my baby.
Blood, sweat, tears, late nights at the office. It was worth it though, seeing my first major project come to life. A lot more went into it than I've even shown here, but I think this is a good enough display of the amount of thought and effort that went into designing an exhibition. I learned so much, and I hope that whatever comes next feels just as rewarding.
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