 so that helps. This is my first conference. And yeah, really, I can't see anything. Amazing. I will talk about typography and exhibition design, but first, since you have no idea who I am, I thought I'd do a little introduction. So yeah, I'm a graphic designer. I live in New York, but for the first 25 years of my life, I lived in Siberia and I decided to just show you instead of trying to explain. It's kind of on the opposite side of the globe from where we are now, and that's this vast area part of Russia. And the town that I'm from is like one of the bigger cities out there, and it's kind of like smack in the middle of the whole Eurasian continent. I would ask if anyone else is from there, but I don't think it's worth that. So when we go down to the street level, that's what it looks like, and it's not a staged photo. And then, you know, I know you probably have heard many things about what it is like, so I decided to put as many gifts on here to see if it crashes my laptop, but it works. So yeah, just to clear the air, it's all true, and it's all real. Okay, yeah. So I've been fortunate to work on some amazing projects, although I haven't been in the business for a very long time. So one of those is, we find a system for whole transportation systems and whole city. Then some bespoke mapping projects for campuses, schools and hospitals. Some smaller wayfinding and signage projects for cultural institutions. Some more fun typography-based illustrations, and just as a side note, this is a special issue on Russia, back when we didn't talk about Russia every day. And then on the side, as a kind of a fun project, I tried to figure out some things with type, still figuring it out. So today, I wanted to talk about typography and exhibition design because that's one of the things that interests me a lot, and of course, no talk is viable here without a historic introduction, so when I started looking into this, I can realize that that's a very relatively new thing, having any type or having any text in the exhibit. So that's how it used to be when we were just starting out with this idea of having objects and having paintings in space. And it's a lot, and it's pretty overwhelming, and there are lots of people in fancy dresses. And if you ever wanted to check out kind of what museum might look like in the 1800s, you should go to Sergeant Sohn Museum in London, which remains unchanged from how it was in 1833 by the Special Act of Parliament. This is on the other side of the Atlantic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it just opened. Again, a lot of people in fancy dresses just kind of mingling, and it's pretty hard to see what the art is, and it doesn't look like they're paying too much attention to that. Then something happened, which is really interesting to me to figure out. This is the first exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it opened in 1929. So I don't know about this couch, seems like questionable thing to have, but you can see that already the walls are white and the paintings are spaced apart a little bit. And then next thing, this is only two and a half years later, the Museum of Modern Art, the couch is gone. But that's not the thing that I wanted to point out here. If you look carefully next to the paintings and the objects, you'll see those little rectangular pieces with type that probably has artist's name and the title of the artwork, and probably something about what gear it was made at and all of that. And we didn't go back. And this is, I could not mention everything that was happening in the world at the same time. Russian avant-garde and Bauhaus and some of the similar movements trying to push what was possible to do in terms of reproduction of photography and infographics and typography at a large scale. And also we never really went back. So now every time you go to an exhibition, you'll probably expect to see a title wall of people crowd in front of and then you'll see a little section text that explains what's happening with the movement or with the historical era that they were talking about. And every, every object has a little text next to it. Those were revolutionary changes that brought on, for example, the expansion and the invention of the profession of the museum curator. So now we have those people who kind of decide what's going to be on view because museums have such vast collections that they can't show you everything like they used to. So now they just select some works and explain them to us. So then my hometown that I'm from had only two museums, one art museum and one historic museum. So when I moved to New York four years ago, I was kind of amazed to find out that there are according to this Wikipedia article there are 212 museums in New York City. Yeah, we have a lot of things like subway issues and small overpriced departments and we have a lot of museums as well. So I decided, as I was preparing for this talk, I decided that I would kind of go around and see what's happening with typography there and try to measure it and try to maybe have some conclusions for you. And I focused on the body typography because there is just so much stuff going on with all kinds of display and title type. So this was some of the photographs that I took during my research and I managed to go to 13 museums over a period of six weeks and they had 44 exhibits in them, 44 that I selected and all of them, 11 were permanent and 33 were temporary which I think reflects kind of the state of business there. And I put together the spreadsheet it was like all the sizes and everything that I kind of was interested in finding out about and there are some pretty interesting facts I thought like for example in this 44 exhibits there was only one use of slab serve. I thought those were popular but not so much but when I ended up kind of with this spreadsheet there was no revelation at the end and there was no like a big conclusion that I could tell you and say like wow no one knew that before now we know. So I kind of, the more I was going to those museums the more I kind of started thinking about the bigger trends and how that relates back to my work and what I can make of that. So I came up with kind of three notions that I wanted to talk about in the second part of my talk that I expressed in three words and the first word is word system. I was pretty surprised that only four of those 13 museums had some underlying structure for how they organized like those little object labels throughout the museum. And you know for me as a person as I'm sure a lot of you are I kind of when there is something that's a few points off every time or something that's just very very different from you going from one room to another it's noticeable so I was immensely satisfied when I found the museum that didn't do that they had one underlying system for that and that made me think of this one project that I worked on in St. Louis for Washington University main library there. Orlin Library has an amazing collection of objects about five and a half million different objects including everything from ancient coins to big costumes so they were doing a renovation project and one of the issues that they were encountering is that they wanted a system that made it easy for curators and the librarians to create exhibits easily without having to go through all the steps every time and having to figure out and reinvent the wheel every time. So this is what they had obviously had to show that this is what the team that I was on came up with this is a 60 foot long case and we figured out the system that was kind of a kit of parts we had pedestals and we had the back panels and we had different lifts and magnetic panels obviously it's pretty complex but the thing that's interesting is the way that you could standardize the way that the graphics appear in it. So we decided to limit everything to this prefabricated system that exists and kind of we chose the three levels of hierarchy so that already dictated what we're going to do. We used we had to use a type that was already licensed and even the colors were pulled from something that they already had before but in a I think more logical or interesting way this is just condensed universe and like a modern cut of basketball that has a pretty big X height. So the reason kind of why we were doing it is we were trying to achieve this modularity and making it easy for them to maintain the system. So I made this style guide for all the graphic labels that they could have. The goal of this is that I made templates for them for every every scenario that they could imagine in every color. So hopefully this exercise just helps them every time they need to change out the exhibit they go through this they figure out what they need and then they just input their content into a template and it's easy and they can divert their resources somewhere else. The second notion is idea of identity. I noticed that a lot of exhibits these days have to do a lot of like work to figure out the marketing strategy and make it recognizable and make make their exhibit kind of an event and a thing of itself. So I was pretty surprised when throughout my survey I saw there were 16 out of 44 exhibits that were kind of doing this thing in a very definitive way one way or another. By identity I kind of mean that in a way where there is either a special type treatment or custom type or some way that the type is rendered in an interesting way like hand painted or three-dimensional. So a couple years ago I was also working on this exhibition for San Diego History Center down in obviously San Diego. They were making an exhibit about history of Jewish heritage down in California and the basic notion of this was that people who came there fleeing from persecution as soon as California became a state in 1850 they made this place their home and they adapted to it and they changed the place as well. So a lot of the content was very place-based and even the name for the exhibit that they came up with was Celebrate San Diego. So we did this concept sketch and I was very kind of concerned about how the letters looked so I thought this is a good opportunity to do something that's interesting and I looked a lot at kind of what Hebrew might look like as printed or as hand-lettered type or written with a nib. There were lots of restraints functionally because we kind of determined that we need as much space as we can get because these letters would have to have exhibits on the other side because that's what we were using them for. We were thinking that he needs to have a base and it's an eight foot square and then also we were thinking it's probably going to be made out of two sheets of MDF that's four by eight feet dimension. So I had to figure out how to do the counters and if I could ship the counters or not. So this is kind of what I ended up doing with them. So the fronts where this images and the backs were the content and this is what came back from the fabricator which is pretty exciting because that's how the Bezier curves translate into Creole MDF which is really exciting and I was going to say that this is kind of the biggest probably way that I would ever see my lettering because it's total 10 feet tall with the base but the screen is actually I think about the same height so maybe that tops that. Yeah this was also very exciting because they made it you know they made the lettering out of real material. While they were doing that I did this logo and so I had to draw additional characters for that and then I was kind of like well I really have that many characters why not make it a type. So no one has asked me to do this I kind of just like sat at my desk for a long time and tried to figure it out and how it was going to work and the client was like oh okay can we have that. So obviously it's unusable for any of the actual body text so we had to kind of follow through on this kind of broad Nib idea and use something from Indian type foundry it's called Bratness which I think worked pretty well but I do think that you know this kind of is an interesting study of what an identity of the show could be if you actually build the letters and the third and the last notion is this idea of expression. It makes me think because I have a regular kind of graphic design background when I started doing exhibitions it always made me kind of confused why some of them don't try to have the content of the exhibition reflect on how everything looks and I know like there are multiple reasons for why that happens which I can't go into now but basically I think this is a bit subjective but 25 out of 44 shows in my research did that one way or another. Sometimes it gets very subtle like for example when you're doing the show on painters of a certain time period you just use type that was cut during that time period so it gets pretty subtle but this year earlier this year the same clients and the history center came back to us because they were doing a show on history of gay lesbian and transgender community down in California and they got a hold of amazing archives they had just really powerful photographs and they had a lot of the early protests and pride marches and people fighting for equality and fighting for their rights so we thought this was extremely powerful on its own and we would just use their house typeface which is calisthenics and kind of try to have the images pull all the weight but then it seemed like it just was very plain and very uninteresting so I had one night to do this and I thought why not try so I tried doing this and I had in mind that square types that I showed you just few minutes ago because they kind of kept it and were using it but mostly I was trying not to have any round shapes because I knew I would be very frustrated and translating them into actual outlines in the type software so I only had this and then I kind of left scanned it and left and then I spent kind of the rest of the night doing making this and it's definitely like it's not perfect at all and it's not even the right word that's how it looks in the layout but I thought it was interesting enough and even if it's there is a one percent of the power of those protest posters that I showed you before in this or emotion or anything close to that I thought that would be really cool some more of it here and I heard here today that imperfections are good but the client didn't think so they yeah they they said we don't think that any respectable institution would ever go for some things sloppy like that and I don't actually know if that's not true so I can't say that it's not true maybe it is but rejection is good too so now I have this thing maybe I'll use it somewhere else and this is what they ended up with and I just kind of thinking about this I think I just do it for love so I don't need any external kind of like client saying this is great or not I will keep doing it anyway and maybe after I do 20 times or 30 times or 40 times I'll come back here and you know it will be better but I will keep doing it anyway that's it