Left: Diagram, Average Day at the Museum: The Year's Work: Annual Report to the Board of Trustees and Corporation Members of the Museum of Modern Art for the Year June 30, 1939–July 1, 1940. Annual reports 1931–40. MoMA Archives. Right: Detail.

An average day at the Museum, which appeared in MoMA’s annual report in 1940, was designed by the in-house graphic design department as a way to show the diverse activities taking place at the Museum. The design has been resurrected in recent years on products such as totebags and notepads in the MoMA Design Store. We always liked this infographic, and wondered what a cross-section of MoMA would look like today, seventy years later? Christoph Niemann, whose illustrations appear in The New Yorker and on his NYTimes.com blog Abstract City, was the perfect candidate to update the illustration for 2009. While the activities stayed roughly the same, the physical space has changed drastically. For this post I asked Niemann to shed some light on his process and the challenges involved in creating this new illustration, which we used to announce this year’s fall exhibition season. Read more

To help promote MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective, we asked Burton himself to animate the MoMA logo for a thirty-second video that would be used to promote the exhibition on television, at the Museum, and online. Tim quickly came up with a concept utilizing stop-motion animation, and he asked Allison Abbate, his producer on Corpse Bride (2005) and the upcoming full-length version of Frankenweenie, if she could help pull things together. Read more