50th anniversary exhibition
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
2025
Exhibition design
Working in Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, I led the design and installation of an exhibition celebrating the milestone of 50 years of the Department. It was an enormous challenge to organise artefacts – especially from multiple contributors – and typeset captions and panels alike, but I was extremely pleased with the results. When the exhibition opened, it was received extremely well by past and present members of the Department.
The Real Job was supervised by Rob Banham, head of department, and I worked closely with the vast majority of other staff within the Department to progress the exhibition. The project developed my communication skills immeasurably: each staff member preferred specific ways of contact, which I had to accommodate.
Captions, typeset in Questa bold italic and regular, were positioned by the side of every artefact on display. The captions were imported into InDesign by means of the Data Merge feature and then checked individually to fix specific issues surrounding hyphenation and line breaking.
For more complex artefacts, a larger caption informed visitors what was where by using a small infographic. These larger captions were also typeset differently to the rest of the captions as they used numbering to orientate the user; these required special attention and care.
The whole exhibition came together with a panel and vitrine for each major topic.