I have been working on some curved reader rails and I feel for anyone who has to design them regularly — they involve advanced geometric wizardry that can make your head spin. (Or not ... but actually, yes, they are tricky.)
Below are two curved reader rails in the Ocean Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in DC. On the left is a rail that looks as though its graphics were not laid-out correctly; I’d guess that the text blocks and graphic elements are angled, but not CURVED to match the round rail edges, which makes the graphic look a little wonky. Look specifically at the text “Meet Phoenix” — see how it angles toward the text block below it? (But how cute is that whale illustration?) On the right, from the same exhibit, another curved rail. It’s a much simpler design, and it works: just two lines of text, set on a baseline curved to the radius of the rail.
Below is a reader rail that I designed for the National Museum of the US Army in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. (We — Christopher Chadbourne & Associates — are still in Design Development so text and images are not final.)
It will ultimately surround a circular, glass-enclosed diorama. Every line of text is on its own track, curved to the radius of the rail; in fact, all graphic elements, including lines and images, have horizontal lines curved to that radius. It took a long time to lay this out.
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Update, 2021: The museum is now open (!!) — but also temporarily closed due to Covid-19 — and you can see the round reader rail and diorama in the photo of the Cold War gallery on the NMUSA website.
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Post updated in January 2021. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 10 January 2010.