OUGD406 - Studio Brief 3 - Exhibition Concept

Fortyfive is an exhibition of first and second year graphic design students at Leeds College of Art. The work shown are redesigns of various theorist book covers. The first year have focused on graphic design theory where as the second year have chosen any book relating to general theories. This exhibition shows the range of visual interpretations from creative minds and showcases the work of upcoming designers in Leeds. 

For the overall exhibition we wanted to give a sophisticated vibe that showed that even though we are students our work is still of a professional standard. We came up with the concept of 45 which is from the combination of level 4 and 5 students. 45 is also quite a significant number in other ways - it is a triangular number, it represents the sum of all decimal numbers and it has strong historical links (see more here). The thing that stood out to us the most was that designers interpret the number 45 as an angle of 45 degrees. This gives us lots of room for designs focusing on angles and lines. Even though the concept itself doesn't relate to the designs we felt that the concept of angles could make the exhibition more engaging to the viewer. Also the fact that we are using degrees of angles could slightly represent that we are degree students. One of our ideas was to hang the work at 45 degree angles to make the people tilt their heads to look at the work, making them have to focus on the work rather than having just a passing glance. We didn't want to go for obvious concepts like colour and shape as we felt that they were overused within exhibitions.

We did a mind map of all that we could find about the number 45 and it was quite interesting how many things related to that number. We decided however that perhaps having so much to do with the number the concept would become confusing. So all the highlighted parts of this mind map are parts of the concept that we are going to move on with for the concept.

When coming up with our concept we wanted quite a contemporary name for the exhibition overall that represented our sophisticated contemporary view of the exhibition. We found that 45 in roman numerals is XLV and we really liked this idea of a simple and kind of secretive name that would intrigue people and want to know more. 

This was my initial concept logo design for XLV, I personally really liked it and felt it was quite contemporary yet others didn't feel the same. When moving on with this design we felt it wasn't contemporary enough as roman numerals are quite an old fashioned system and we felt that it doesn't really relate to anything but the number itself. Also we felt that it wasn't successful in translating our concept and that just sticking to the number 45 would be a lot clearer than disguising it with roman numerals.

After deciding on the concept we thought we should create a mindmap of the style of exhibition that we wanted using adjectives.

We realised after doing this that the style of design that we wanted would be quite classy and professional going with a quite contemporary vibe.

We also created a mind map of all the things that we wanted to produce for the exhibition, i.e. our collateral.

We narrowed all of our ideas into a few and assigned tasks to each person in the group. However we would obviously collaborate a bit so all the designs weren't in a completely different style.