Illuminating
Inspiration:
Event
Branding
Design Center, Fall 2023
For this Design Center project, students were shown the Georgia Museum of Art’s upcoming Elegant Salute gala event branding, then tasked to create a hypothetical event brand for the museum’s 75th anniversary. I chose to focus on the lens of “Illuminating Inspiration” for the museum with a neon signage theme, creating an original design system and a series of three posters for the mock event.
Brand Identity
Planning & Drafts
For the initial stages of the project, I focused on multiple different ways to approach the idea of an anniversary branding. I experimented with ideas of blooming and growth, looking through the lens of a camera, and other more abstract ideas before finally settling on the concept of light.
Concept Development
After settling on the theme of light, I started to focus on backlit forms reminiscent of the piece Shimmer from the Georgia Museum of Art. While the idea was promising, the execution was a bit off, and the overall theme read more as an aquarium than it did a museum.
Neon Signage
Based on feedback from my peers, I leaned more into an alternate form of illumination—neon signage. Instead of working with vectors in Illustrator like I did for my previous drafts, I shifted to Photoshop and started experimenting with rendering styles that were a bit more photo-realistic. I also drafted a version of Shimmer from the museum in the same neon style, an approach that was considered significantly more successful than my previous one.
Final Logo
After some revision from my previous drafts, I finally settled on a logo that blended both neon signage and informational text. The icon itself is a combination of the 75 for the museum’s anniversary, a lightbulb, and part of the museum’s actual logo.
Poster Design
Poster Development
After designing the neon system used for the logo, I was able to translate notable works from the Georgia Museum of Art into the same style. Each piece was carefully translated, making sure to keep both the recognizable forms of the actual pieces and the realistic bends of neon tubes in mind during the process. The result was a bright, fun, and colorful series of posters celebrating the inspiration sparked from the museum’s collection.
