Exhibition Planning and Initial Designs

Imagine you are given the chance to create a piece of art/design to be featured on a new Golden record. What would you want to show/say and how would this be communicated to an alien species? Will you try help them understand one specific aspect of planet earth or will you approach the task in a broader sense? Submissions can be in any form you like; Design, illustration, film, photography. Submissions must fit to the dimensions of 290 by 290 mm (square format).

We created this brief for submissions for the exhibit and started thinking about the logistics of the event. The brief is quite open ended but we thought this would work well as we are keen on the idea of there being a real range of work, examining this idea of people communicating what they think is important about earth. There would be just over 2 months for this submission period which would ensure we could get enough entries and we thought it might be cool to display 41 submissions at the exhibition, relating to the archive 41 name. Obviously if we had more submissions, we would have to curate what work goes in. 

I made some initial mock up designs for posters. The exhibition would require two different posters, one which calls for submissions which we would put up around uni, and one which would advertise the event in general, this would go up in uni as well as more out and about. For the first design I utilised the grey and orange we chose for the branding and took a lot of inspiration from the NASA manual, using a basic layout with the square grid seen in the manual. The design works quite well but is possibly not eye catching and contemporary enough. I tried out a poster with some imagery - a photo of the voyager rocket but ultimately again it waste eye catching enough. I then created some bolder posters which utilise orange gradient circular shapes which reflect thew circular golden record, as well as resembling the sun, emphasising this idea of space travel. I utilised Anissette which was used in the logo for ‘Call for Submissions’ and other dates on the poster so that they were bold and eye catching and used Futura bold for the body text and the square grids, like in the Nasa manual. I like on the first poster how the logo lines up with the angle of the quarter circle shape, which gives it some structure.