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Not Just Words

Brief

A visual identity and installation design for an exhibition about language. Unusually, this show took its starting point from art and objects to showcase the work of UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). They produced a series of language taster videos that explore the origins of words and how language and culture intertwine.

Planning

The challenge was to align the exhibition with that of an existing and connected project – A language is not just words. This project was a series of animated nursery rhymes that were shared with young children in schools in several different languages, and its logo used overlapping shapes and playfully aligned typography.

The new exhibition on the other hand, was for a grown-up academic audience and needed to complement the very beautiful (and yellow) Art Museum at UCL in which it was to be displayed.

Installation

I worked closely with the exhibitions manager to test out the physical aspects of the show, including sizing and opacity of wall vinyl, placement of hung artworks and the logistics of each specialist installer team that need to work in sequence.

Outcome

The exhibition has been really well received, looking very much how I’d imagined. It has been so rewarding to see my digital plans come to life in a 3D space and I hope to do more of this kind of work soon.

I am especially pleased with how the iPad stands look in real life, as these were still in production when I was designing the captions and so I’d only seen sketches. Seeing them as objects in the context of the gallery is really gratifying.