MoMA | Tag: graphic design

Posts tagged ‘graphic design’

January 29, 2010 | Design, Events & Programs

Anything but a Guidebook

Posted by Ingrid Chou, Assistant Creative Director, Department of Advertising and Graphic Design

An unusual approach is one of the key strategies that signal an ideological shift.

When approached by Francesca Rosenberg to design the Meet Me publication for MoMA’s Access Programs, we were given three criteria:

1. Must use hot-pink color. (I’m not kidding. If you know Francesca Rosenberg, MoMA’s Director of Access and Community Programs, you would know that this is a legitimate request.)

2. Don’t make it look like a guidebook (even though, in its essence, it is a guidebook).

3. Make the content accessible to three diverse audiences: museum professionals, care organizations, and individual families.

The unusual color request was just one sign of how MoMA’s Access Program educators were contributing to an ideological shift in the way both institutions and individuals think about Alzheimer’s disease. This was not going to be just another black-and-gray manual. The intention was to create a book that was uplifting in both function and form, focusing on the fact that life can still be meaningful and joyful for these families, a book that embodies the mission and focus of the Meet Me at MoMA program. This was going to be a book about inspiring meaningful interactive experiences, making connections between people and art, and making art accessible. It would be anything but a guidebook.

January 7, 2010 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions, Design

A Home for PIG 05049

Posted by Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist, Department of Architecture and Design

Christien Meindertsma with Julie Joliat. PIG 05049. 2004-2006.

Christien Meindertsma with Julie Joliat. PIG 05049. 2004–06.

The growing concern for the world’s environment (hotly debated last month in Copenhagen) has inspired people to question the origins of the things they consume, leading to trends like the slow food and fair trade movements, and films like Food, Inc. A similar curiosity led the Dutch artist/designer Christien Meindertsma to track all the products made from “05049,” an actual pig selected at random from a commercial farm in the Netherlands. After its slaughter, Meindertsma discovered that the single pig was used in 185 different products, all of which are pictured in her book. PIG 05049, a collaboration between Meindertsma and the graphic designer Julie Joliat, is a visual catalog of the “afterlife” of one animal that reveals the complexity of the meat-processing industry and of our manmade world.

December 11, 2009 | Collection & Exhibitions, Design, Events & Programs

Ellen Lupton Inspires a New Kind of Visual Literacy

Posted by August Heffner, Design Manager, Graphic Design

After nearly a month of visiting the Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity exhibition, many of us throughout the Museum took away at least one powerful message: don’t be afraid to cross disciplines. The fearlessness, enthusiasm, and collaboration of the students and masters is apparent in the show’s work.

So, upon learning that design education legend and DIY hero Ellen Lupton would be running several workshops in the Bauhaus Lab series, our Graphic Design department decided not to make a poster for her visit, but rather to shoot and edit a video. Of course, stepping out of your area of expertise requires collaboration, so we teamed up with two of the Museum’s video experts: Beth Harris, Director of Digital Learning, and David Hart, Associate Media Producer. It was a humbling and exciting experience.

November 27, 2009 | Behind the Scenes, Design

An Average Day At the Museum reinterpreted by Christoph Niemann

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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.

November 13, 2009 | Behind the Scenes, Collection & Exhibitions, Design, Film

The Making of Tim Burton’s MoMA Animation

Posted by Julia Hoffmann, Creative Director, Advertising and Graphic Design

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.

November 11, 2009 | Behind the Scenes, Collection & Exhibitions, Events & Programs

Bauhaus Lounge: When the Couch Matches the Art

Posted by Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Programs, Department of Education

Bauhaus Lounge, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Center

Matching the artwork with the living room couch is one of the perennial concerns of any collector. But when it comes to the Bauhaus, which was as much about designing couches as it was about artworks, finding the right furniture piece shouldn’t be a problem. Or so it seemed to us at the Education Department. During the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, we imagined turning the reading room space in MoMA’s Cullman building into a Bauhaus Lounge, equipped with Bauhaus furniture for visitors to relax on while they watch a video of a reconstruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet or browse through Bauhaus literature. We thought we had enough original Bauhaus-designed chairs lying around MoMA’s buildings that it couldn’t be too hard to put such a lounge together. We do have a Wassily chair (no one remembers where it came from) that sits in the Education offices; we also snatched away a few other chairs from a conference room and two Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs from outside of Glenn Lowry’s office waiting area (his office wants them back after the show).

November 6, 2009 | Behind the Scenes, Design

Bauhaus: The Graphic Design Department Goes Back to School

Posted by August Heffner, Design Manager, Graphic Design

Rendering of the title wall for Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity

In December 1938, hordes of visitors packed the opening of MoMA’s Bauhaus retrospective in the temporary galleries at 14 West Forty-ninth Street in Rockefeller Center. Guests followed painted footprints and abstract graphics on the floor guiding them through the show’s seven hundred items, while reading titles rendered in handsome pin-mounted condensed letterforms. The Bauhaus’s own graphic design and typography legend, Herbert Bayer came to New York to design the exhibition himself. And today, over seventy years later, it was both the Bauhaus and Bayer’s legacy that kept most of MoMA’s Department of Graphic Design awake at night, as we began to design the title wall for Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity.

November 5, 2009 | Viewpoints, Visitor Viewpoint

Visitor Viewpoint: Bibi Saks and the Modern Aesthetic

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MoMA member Bibi Saks inspires her friends to clear off their counter-tops.

Is this your first trip to MoMA?
I used to live in Forest Hills when I was young. I went to school at Pratt to study painting, so I used to come here all the time. I’ve been a member ever since I was a student. I live in Massachusetts now, but this is where I come the moment I get into NYC.

How often do you come down here?
We have a timeshare in NYC, so we come down pretty often. MoMA is my second skin. You can’t check in at the hotel until 4:00 p.m., so we always come here first. It’s like Thanksgiving, the holidays—it’s a homecoming. It’s a relative. Yet every time I come here it’s exciting because there’s always something new.

Has the Museum changed much since your first visit here?
There’s more to see and more to know—it was much smaller back then. The architecture too has really become part of the experience. It’s like a yin yang. There’s so much to look at. Yes, there’s the collection, but then you stop to look at the Museum itself. I was just sitting here staring at the windows and admiring the details—it’s just exquisite.

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