Letters With Wings sneak peek at the National Postal Museum

If you stop by the Smithsonian National Postal Museum during the next couple of months, you’ll be able to see two exhibitions that I’ve designed. One is New York City: A Portrait Through Stamp Art (on view through May 14; full project view here); the other just opened.

Beneath the museum’s escalators, in the Franklin Foyer, are two cases for temporary exhibitions. The museum intends to change these cases often with displays of recent acquisitions, favorite objects, niche subjects, and the like.

I created a design system for the museum’s in-house use when putting together these quick little exhibitions, and I designed the first exhibition to use the system: a “sneak peek” of an upcoming exhibition about WWII airmail tentatively called Letters With Wings.

The design system included color palette, guidelines for layout of didactic and label graphics, sets of case furniture and graphic panels, and examples of case arrangements.

I also designed a series of banners and an “attract graphic” to brand the Franklin Foyer space. The attract graphic will be a geometric, cone-like acrylic structure with a changeable title panel; two will be installed in the open triangles of space between the artifact cases and the undersides of the escalators. (You can see the “open triangles of space” in the photos above.) They will protrude slightly into the space, above head level, and draw visitors’ attention from the atrium space. They’re not currently installed, but I look forward to seeing them there in the future.

There are no physical artifacts in either case of the currently installed exhibition, so objects are represented as printed graphics. (Docents will occasionally bring out the real objects for visitors, which are being prepared for the larger exhibition.) The printed representations are mounted to sintra (a lightweight, yet rigid, PVC sheet) to give them depth.

If you’re in the Washington, DC area, please check out this little exhibition — and New York Stamp Art, too — while they’re still on view!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 28 March 2017.

Pacific Exchange, open at the National Postal Museum

Work shown was completed while I was a designer at Gallagher & Associates.

It’s open! Okay, old news. It opened well over a month ago, on March 6. I had also planned to post about the opening reception, but that was March 20, so — old news there as well. In any case, the reception was lovely, with Chinese food served and tinkling glassware and everyone dressed quite nicely.

Pacific Exchange: China & U.S. Mail is the second exhibit to be on view in the Postmasters Suite gallery at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. From the exhibit website: Using mail and stamps, Pacific Exchange brings a human scale to Chinese–U.S. relations in three areas: commerce, culture, and community. The exhibit focuses on the 1860s to the 1970s, a time of extraordinary change in China. It also explores Chinese immigration to the United States, now home to four million Chinese Americans. (Thank you to James O'Donnell of the Smithsonian for the above photo.)

Upfront: I am a bit of a stamp nerd. I have a small collection of Olympics stamps, mostly international, from the 1960s and 1970s. (You have to focus when collecting stamps!) So I really enjoyed working on an exhibit about philately.

This was my swan song at Gallagher & Associates. I handled the design myself, from designing the exhibit’s visual concept to laying out production files for all of the graphics. I also designed the exhibit plan and artifact case layouts. Even though this is a small exhibit space, it had more than 100 artifacts, so making [nearly] everything fit comfortably was a bit of a challenge!

The design drawing above is an example of how a case layout looked during design development, and below are those same cases, made real:

Graphics were digital output mounted on sign blank, trimmed to edges, with a matte overlaminate. The wall-mounted and freestanding graphics were backed with 1/2" MDF painted Benjamin Moore “Bonfire” to match the primary exhibit red (Pantone 1795). The freestanding graphics had duplicate panels on either side of the mdf — a panel sandwich which was held in place by adjustable metal sign bases. The Smithsonian Office of Exhibits Central printed and built the graphic components. Blair Fabrication built the case furniture.

Most of the exhibit text is in English and Chinese, a design challenge I enjoyed. In the artifact case below, some of the artifacts were loans that had to be displayed flat. The other half of the plinth has a 15° rise to create a comfortable reading angle.

I arrived at the color palette after some research into significant colors in Chinese culture. I used red and gold as the dominant exhibit colors, with a deeper maroon red for accent. I used a third red, one with pink undertones — red, is the color of prosperity and good fortune, among other meanings — for the Commerce section of the exhibit; yellow, the color of heroism, for the Community section; and blue-green (or qing), to give a feeling of Chinese history and tradition, for the Culture section. I also drew distinctive vector patterns for each section.

The element that most people extol is the group of banners in the entrance. There are three individual banners and they’re more than 20 feet tall! EPI Colorspace printed and installed them. (Install photos here.) They were printed on “Brilliant Banner” 12 mil. polyester banner fabric. The fabric has a very subtle canvas texture that wasn’t what I originally intended — I wanted a silken look for the banners — but the color saturation and printing quality was so good that I went with EPI’s recommendation.

I also designed a few of the related print graphics: the exhibit catalogue, a postcard, and the invitation to the opening reception.

The exhibit has been well-received overall and I’m thrilled with how everything turned out. If you’re in DC between now and January 4, 2015, please check it out!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits and additional photos. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 26 April 2014.

The News 01.19.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

L.A.’s Natural History Museum to receive $1-million grant for new permanent exhibition | Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront — I’ve been following with interest the progress of the program and upcoming exhibit on the MoMA/P.S.1 blog | Towards a New Mainstream? On 27 January 2–3pm EST, a lecture by Gregory Rodriguez exploring demographic change in the Americas, cultural transformation, and the future of museums | Color Identifying System for the Color Blind | An Increasing Craving for Experiences; there has been a lot written lately about experience-over-stuff — hello, museums! | Light Touch interactive projector turns any flat surface into a touchscreen | An Architect’s Philosophy of Photography | Steffen Dam: Specimen Panels These are beautiful; very “natural history museum” | Barton’s Bonbonniere, From Architectural Forum c. 1952 — I love it! What a fun space.

AND NOW, something from the portfolio:

Work shown was completed while I was a designer at Christopher Chadbourne & Associates.

This time last year (January 17, 2009), the Tampa Bay History Center — designed by Christopher Chadbourne & Associates — held its grand opening in downtown Tampa, Florida. I worked closely with the project’s senior graphic designer Jeff Stammen on design development.

(Photo above and first three photos below, courtesy Tampa Bay History Center.)

I took a leading design role for the timeline (Your Tampa Bay) and the War Stories gallery. Below is my sketch of the War Stories gallery, and below that, a photo I took during installation — hence the empty case.

All the graphics in this museum were designed with both English and Spanish text. I love the challenge of designing multilingual graphics.

I was also responsible for Construction Administration, and supervised the exhibit installation. I love shop visits, site visits, inspecting fabrication samples … all of that. What happened with the Tampa installation was a little … let’s just say, complicated. The local fabricator, Creative Arts, was fantastic and saved the installation day in a lot of ways. I ended up effectively living in a hotel room for a couple weeks during the tail end of installation — much longer than my trip to Tampa was supposed to be. It was quite the learning experience. In hindsight, I can say I had fun.

(Photo above and photo below, courtesy Tampa Bay History Center.)

Post updated in January 2021. Broken links have been fixed or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 19 January 2010.