Studio Brief 03 - Exhibition Branding - Ideas / Personal Research / Group Interaction

Research - 

As a group we sat down and looked into the brief, we decided to start with the research we should split it up into sections so each of us had an area to research which we could then bring back to the group and see how far everyone had got and what leads they had made. I was offered to look into exhibition advertising, as this is an area that I am interested in I thought it would given me the opportunity to expand my knowledge and use this knowledge to help our group move forward in the brief. 

Exhibition Advertising -

When the brief was briefed we were all shown some examples of advertising done for some places and some key areas were bought up when looking at creating advertising for an exhibition I took these themes forward with my research so I was looking for consistency and content and how it links with the exhibition theme. 

Design Museum - 

Throughout the exhibitions shown at the Design Museum the advertising all follows a defiant theme of simplicity they show that they are very keen for people to get excited about the the exhibitions that they have one because they show them off in a simple and unique way which get the audiences attention because it is different to most of other exhibitors advertising. You can see how they have a simple museum branding that follows the posters they are not trying to over complicate anything. What I got from looking at the design museums advertising was that we should look at how are adverting can be consistent but playful at the same time, because if i saw any of these posters in the street I would stop and look because they are eye catching which is the job they are meant to do. 

 Tate Modern - 

Although the Tate is mainly art they still have great advertising for the exhibitions that many people visit a year meaning that they must be doing something right. Again the branding is very simple but people know what it is from the simple logo type. For the advertising the feature artists work on posters or they will have something that has been created specially that links with the exhibition, this allows for people to get a snippet of what could be going on in the exhibition. By giving the audience a taster it is a great way for them to want to come and see the exhibition because if they enjoyed the adverting they will enjoy the exhibition that is showcasing the work from the posters. 

V&A -

The V&A use their simple branding as a way of advertising an exhibition, because it is such a well known and respected museum they are able to use the branding to help sell the exhibition, because the like the Tate Modern people will go to the events because they see who it is hosted by. We can use this method within our poster design as LCA is well respected meaning that people will be more enticed to come along, specially industry creatives they will know the high standard of work and this will bring them in. 

Other - 

Group Ideas -

After going away and researching by myself we came back and presented the research that we came up with giving examples of way to move the project forward. We created serval mind maps to get all our thoughts down on paper. We came up with five different concepts that we be appropriate for this brief. First and idea that involved the use of traditional print methods, this would be to highlight one of the key features of the exhibition he fact the the money would all be produced in a traditional way rather than digital, the idea is to raise awareness of these methods. Idea two and three are very similar but they are both an experience type of exhibition the first would be a bank experience and the whole space would be transformed into a bank and the wayfinding would be like and bank, the invites would be used around cheques etc. The other experience idea was a bank vault,  the idea is to spilt the space into 2 areas for Level 4 and Level 5 we thought that this would be good as people could then see the progression between the two years.

We then took these five ideas into crit with a tutor this then enabled us to work with them and figure out which idea was most suitable and why. I found this page very useful because we were able to get some outsider help that meant we could then develop the ideas more. Once we spoke about the ideas with the tutor we were told that the best way forward was to combine two ideas together that would create a much stronger idea. These ideas were the traditional print methods and the vault idea, both had elements that had potential then next stage was to bring them together and develop it more with examples of work and mock ups.

Moving forward with these two ideas meant that there was many things that we had to figure out what may not work together so we had to cut out what was good and what was bad. We deiced that we were going to base the main idea from the vault, and use the traditional print part as a more interactive section of the exhibition, where people could go and watch things being screen printed etc. 

The stage we decided to draw up a contract, this decided who was doing what so that we could get on with designing the ideas that we had thought of. We considered the areas that needed to be covered in order for us to have a functioning exhibition. I was chosen to do the adverting as I had already looked at how exhibition use adverting. this meant I was looking about creating a campaign with a strong visual style and I would be working closely the social media and branding team. In order to shape what our exhibition will look I started too look at possible posters ideas and also branding too.

My Response -

After some thought about how we could make The Vault theme work visually we came up with the idea of using lasers. As vaults have security lasers are part of this and I thought that we could use this to create a more visual style that could run through out.

I started by using a simple bold typeface Proxima Nova bold, this is very impactful and eye catching. This was the the base layer of initial branding just using a logo type like a lot of research that I found. I wanted to include the LCA logo as well as this is also another impactful thing that I learnt fro my research, because this is also like the secondary brand for the exhibition as it is being run by LCA students (us). 

Developing my idea of using the simple type changed into involving the laser idea more, as we wanted the laser to be a running theme throughout the exhibition (wayfinding and branding). I came up with this series of posters that we could use as advertising for the exhibition, these set the tone for the rest of the ideas for the brief. The idea behind the poster was that they could be used to be put up all around Leeds in different places and by making them all slightly different this would grab the attention of more people. I also thought that the idea would also work very well for the social media side too, the bright colours are impactful when on screen the land scape layout would work with the ideas that the social media team had.