The past few years have been a time of transformation for my design aesthetic and understanding. I have had experience with product development and package design at Nickelodeon and I’ve since worked on plenty of smaller projects. When I began working for the Institute for the Arts and Humanities as their only designer in a somewhat unmanaged sense— I had no art director or even another designer to bounce ideas off of, I felt like an exercise in branding was in order.The first problems I saw were a lack of consistency amongst the materials made at the institute and the second problem was a lack of design. Text was thrown around, awkwardly sized, poorly kerned, and boring. It was clear to me that the biggest problem was that designers would spend 1-2 years at the institute and then leave. But these were not necessarily designers by trade. They were art education graduate students who may or may not know something about print design, following the lead of their predecessor only to dig themselves deeper into a design conundrum.

I decided to begin by clarifying the data in the posters that I designed, placing the critical information in the same places in all the posters I was designing— essentially using the four corners as grounding points for information. The background of each poster would be unique, based on the topic being discussed with a different typeface used for each new posters titling and the same type used for all other critical information. This allowed the posters to be clean where it counted and interesting from across a room. As you get closer to the poster, the important information emerges from the depths of the artwork in the background. This, to me, is the most important part of this particular kind of design. You have to draw people in from a distance with a strong enough image that can be seen from 20 feet away, and then reward them with legible information when they get close enough to read the data.

The Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Needless to say one of my goals has been to give the Institute an ideantity that is stable and consistant but also one that can be carried on from generation to generation of designer, regardless of whether they are a trained designer. Probably one of the things that impacts the Institutes look the most is the lack of designers who have been classically educated in design (myself included, though I have worked in the field professionally for a decade building my sense of design from colleagues and friends whom I’ve worked with over the years).