Made in Japan Exhibition
ClientsPoster House Museum
StudioKudos Design Collaboratory
Project TypeExhibition Design
AwardsCommunications Arts Design Annual
Print Award- Environmental Design Second Place
Press
International Business Time
GDUSA
Creative Director
Robert de Saint Phalle
3D Creative Director
Ashley Wu
Art Director
Fay Qiu
Lead Designer
Imam Fadillah
3D Renderer
Amanda Knott
Project Manager
Our exhibition design for Poster House took inspiration from geometric shapes found in Nihon Buyö, a poster designed by Ikko Tanaka, a godfather figure in Japanese graphic design history. A triptych of oversized title walls unfurled like a Japanese folding fan to greet visitors at the entrance and create a permeable exhibit space to carry them seamlessly through the exhibit timeline.
We wanted an immersive motif to accentuate the posters and create a visual through-line for all the posters designed in the last century.
We chose color hues to serve as thematic backdrops for each section of the gallery. These vividly colorful shapes started small but quickly became larger as one progressed through the exhibit, finally becoming larger than the gallery walls.
Oversized typography—inspired by lettering found on the ships that brought Japanese immigrants to the American continent—infused the exhibit with a sense of industrialization and globalization, two forces that greatly influenced the evolution of graphic design in Japan.