Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin is a New York-based fluorescent light artist who is concentrated on the relationship between his sculptures and the spaces they inhabited. The brand is designed around the idea of an exhibition catalog that lays out information in a bold, colorful and clean way. Stunning photography showcases each individual light creation and provides inspiration for other artists who look for new and resourceful ways to make unique art. A website directs the user through the history of Flavin, popular exhibitions he created and artists that have been inspired by him. A wayfinding experience helps to guide the viewer through the museum’s exhibition in hopes to get the viewer excited about the art of fluorescent lighting.
Art Director:
Dermot McCormack
Process
The briefing of this project was to create an exhibition catalog, website, and wayfinding based on a minimalist artist. My first concept was to create a catalog on the minimal artist Dan Flavin that included information about himself, along with exhibitions he had created.
As someone who loves old neon signs, I was intrigued by the idea of how fluorescent lighting has changed and how it is being used in art today. As I conducted my research, I discovered that many artists have created their neon works because they were inspired by Flavin and what he created with factory fluorescent tubing. I decided to add these artists into my catalog as a way to show viewers that light art is still an up and coming interesting and amazing form of art. It was important to me to create a bold and nontraditional catalog that someone would want to pick up and read, so I looked a lot into new, creative types of catalogs and publications.
This eventually leads me to create a system of geometrically shaped pages that allowed the photography to take the spotlight and the text to play off the angles that were then being created. I was inspired by the shapes Flavin was able to make out of the purely straight fluorescent tubing along with Hey Studios who use a lot of brightly colored paper with a variety of cuts and layers in their own catalogs. I choose a rounded font that closely mimicked the narrow roundness of the fluorescent tubing. The bold and playful nature of this catalog both followed a grid and broke the grid creating many geometric shapes and angles.
LOGO & ANIMATION
Style Tile for logo design
A sketch showing how I wanted each part of my logo to appear individually so that it created the full logo at the end of my animation.
DAN FLAVIN CATOLOG
Sketches for pages of book layout. This helped me to get an idea of the kind of geometric shapes I was able to use to hold photos and which pages had to be full sized in order to hold text.
WEBSITE
Sketched wireframe of the initial idea of what the website will look like.
First-round wireframe ideas of the homepage design and how the pages were going to flow.