Five months of hard work with the rest of my fellow Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS) students have passed and the exhibition is finally up and running, and quite successfully may I say. Now is a good time to look back and think a little bit about this wonderful experience and how we spent out time during those 5 months of preparation.
The class was separated onto 5 teams: The Graphic Design Team, Education Team, Curatorial Team, Web Design Team, Exhibition Design Team, and Project Coordinators. I ended up in the Graphic Design Team with two other team members and our mentor, Gerry Greaney. We started by meeting and deciding what type of materials (print and web) we wanted to produce, and upon discussion with other teams throughout the semester the final list ended up as follows: an exhibition catalog, a “sensory guide” brochure, identity files for the website, marquee graphics, labels, posters, programs for events, signage for the gallery and other miscellaneous materials.
The bulk of our time was spent on the most ambitious publication, which was the exhibition catalog. The catalog consists of 36 pages of full color images and content. After determining our graphic identity, we proceeded to make a list of content that would have to be generated for the catalog. The content included essays, biographies, a fact sheet, image captions and a curatorial statement. The content was generated by a variety of teams and then laid out by the graphic design team onto our catalog. We also discussed the format that the catalog would take and what would make it stand out from other exhibition catalogs. We tried to focus mainly on characteristics of Laure’s work that we could translate onto the pages of the catalog to make it very specific to her work and thought process.
Our main goal for the catalog was to create a publication that would accurately represent the exhibition but also offer an additional insight into Laure Drogoul’s world. We found ourselves really thinking about the interactivity of Laure’s work, which lead to adding interactive elements to the catalog and other publications. These elements appear in the form of a magnifying glass that ne can use to read very small text in the catalog and Scratch N’ Sniff stickers!
We met weekly with our mentor and produced sketches and mock-ups that were then consolidated by our mentor. The files would then be revised by our team, Laure Drogoul (the artist), Gerald Ross (the curator) and sometimes other teams and mentors. Along with the collection of content came another difficult task: the collection of images. All images existed in many different formats and some dated back to the 1980’s. We identified all the images we would need and got a hold of them; some had to be scanned, some existed digitally, and some things had to be photographed all together.
Somehow we managed to pull it all off as quickly as we could and just barely made our deadlines, but it was all worth it. We did one final visit to the printing press to review the proofs, and after some tweaking based on our suggestions, we gave them the O.K. and 3,000 beautiful catalogs were printed. While this was happening, our team hand-stamped and stuffed 3,000 envelopes with tiny magnifying glasses that were then placed inside that catalog.
I’m sure every EDS student will tell you that this is the most demanding class they’ve ever had, but I’m sure I speak for most of us when I say that it is also one of the most rewarding as well. No team would have functioned without the other and our publications certainly wouldn’t have been the same without all the support from our fellow teams. If you can’t make it to the exhibition space, make sure to download a PDF version of the catalog from the website!
~Rafael S.
