Y Design

Our office designed the program and postcard invitation for Yale College New Music's February concert, Choral Fest IV!. The concert, which featured special guest vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, was held in Beinecke Library as part of its 50th anniversary year celebrations.

To ensure a strong "family resemblance" among all materials related to this year, we used the color scheme, typography, and logo of Beinecke's 50th anniversary identity (also designed by our office). We introduced layered type on the cover and a secondary alignment scheme (rotated and vertically centered) for content type descriptors (program, composers, etc.) as a typographic reflection of the program's experimental content.

Photographs courtesy of Rebecca Martz.

You've probably heard that the greatly expanded Yale University Art Gallery opens to the public today after fourteen years of planning and construction. The renovations -- including the restoration of the "Old Art Gallery" (Swartwout Building) and Street Hall -- double the space of the gallery and allow for the display of more than 4,000 additional artworks. The post-renovation YUAG is truly incredible and overwhelming in only the best of ways: aside from all of the art, the museum itself is an aesthetic journey. Careful integration of original architectural features with contemporary design and engineering, strong color, consistent typography for label and exhibition graphics, and thoughtful placement of the artworks all contribute to YUAG's world-class experience. Today I'm writing about just a small part of all the preparation that went into YUAG's grand reopening: two pieces of print collateral.

Chris Sleboda, Director of Graphic Design at YUAG, and his team designed an energetic and visually clear identity system for YUAG, which they applied to everything from the museum's floor-plan pamphlet (pictured above) to exhibition graphics to a giveaway booklet (pictured below). Color (predominantly bright blue, gold, black, and white) is used to great effect in both the floor plan and the booklet: informational structure and elements of the book are highlighted consistently, which allows the viewer to immediately understand how elements are grouped and/or related.

The excellence of these two publications speaks to the level of detail and care that went into the entire renovation. See it for yourself at the grand opening today -- ribbon cutting happens at noon!

There's more to the George Nelson exhibition at the School of Architecture than furniture and wooden models -- the entire back wall of the exhibition is dedicated to Nelson's work as a graphic designer and art director. The materials focus mostly on Nelson's designs for Herman Miller and the Howard Miller Clock Company, including advertisements, printed brochures, company logos, and more. The work of Irving Harper, Don Ervin, and George Tscherny completed under Nelson's direction is also featured.

It's worth noting that prohibitively high printing costs at the time mandated a limited palette for print materials. Most of these designs use only one or two colors (plus the white of the paper and sometimes black ink). But this limitation proved to be a boon throughout the process of forging a copororate identity, as it forced Nelson and his design team to use shape, scale, composition, and typography to draw the viewer's attention to the visual punchline. The red-orange color (and the accompanying palette of black and white) that appears frequently in the materials pictured above is now strongly tied to both Herman Miller and to the design era that gave birth to the company. 

Visit the gallery in Rudolph Hall at 180 York Street to see the rest of Nelson's work. The exhibition runs through 2 February 2013.

I noticed this colorful poster hanging by the information desk in the Haas Arts Library. It advertises Thursday's open house at the Yale School of Art. The poster is particularly effective in its clear presentation of several levels of information hierarchy: the designers had to distinguish between the main title (Yale MFA 2013-14), secondary headings (website, event title, date), subsidiary information (QR code, Dean Robert Storr's message, department names), and background texture (faculty names, color, and shape). 

The poster was designed by Henk van Assen, a critic in Yale's graphic design program, with Loide Marwanga, YC '10, and Sarah Eidelson, YC '12. The dimensionality of this poster -- a sense created by the overlapping/cut-out/stencilled letters in the background -- complicates the picture plane and draws the viewer in to interact with the complexity of the poster's information.

In Henk's words, "The fragmented design and typography tries to accomplish a visual 'voice' that represents the School of Art as a dynamic, productive, inquisitive institution where, in Dean Storr's words: 'students have work to do.' In addition to attracting general attention, the color helps to connect the names of faculty to the respective concentrations within the school. The relatively large scale differentiation between overall message and faculty names generates both a spatial experience and provides a visual texture that only becomes clear when looking up close. The QR code connects directly to the applications page on the web site."

Find out more about the School of Art's MFA Open House on their website.

PDF-derived images courtesy of Henk van Assen.