In March 2018 I worked with Faisal Hussain of True Form Projects and Izzy Mohammed of Future Seed to provide graphic design for their Birmingham-based Asian Youth Culture Heritage project. As well as providing design input for two exhibitions (at Birmingham City University Parkside Gallery and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) I was also engaged to design the project logo, website and marketing materials.
Heritage and art exhibition design
This was my first time working on graphics for an exhibition and one of the greatest challenges was working to an increased physical scale. I am used to designing for digital screens and conventional print sizes, but the exhibition design required layouts for three-metre tall exhibition panels and other such graphics. A lot of these were produced using full-bleed vinyl printing, so there were lots of different technical and conceptual factors to consider during the design process.
Birmingham City University Parkside Gallery Exhibition
The first exhibition which took place in March 2018 was largely based around photography commissioned for the Asian Youth Culture project. Three different groups of Asian youth in Birmingham had been captured by photographers Ines Elsa Dala and Ian Reynolds. The groups were young Asian women, MMA fighters and young people attending the Gosta Mondays club night. In addition there were informational boards and some archive objects, as well as a cinema showing archive footage specially compiled for the exhibition. My job was to create motifs and backdrops to complement the work without overwhelming it. In addition to the photography many of the young people had been interviewed and so I also needed to weave their narratives into the overall graphic display.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Exhibition (BMAG)
Due to the nature of the space and broader scope the BMAG exhibition did not require the same background graphics, but instead involved laying out text for information boards, captions and labels. The graphics in this setting were more restrained and served to provide information rather than enhancing and tying together the photographic and interview elements as at BCU.