When designing the MoMA posters, we had to choose one designer from a list of several, and utilize their particular style to create a poster for a MoMA lecture series. The first thing I did was go to MoMA’s website and see what lectures they had currently going on in hopes of helping me decide which artist to focus on. The lecture I chose to represent was Contemporary Art Forum: The Curative Object. The lecture focuses on pressing issues in contemporary art and the curative properties of engaging with and making objects. I felt that architect and designer Zaha Hadid and her team was a perfect fit for this lecture.

 

In the first poster, I used an image of one of her installations called Cirrus, as the focal point of the design. I believe MoMA’s logo is done in a stylized version of Franklin Gothic done specifically for them, so I used that typeface to create the logo and work the text.

 

As all of Zaha Hadid’s work has a sense of rhythm and movement in each piece, whether it’s a curvilinear building, or an installation, and I tried to recreate that effect with the information about the event. I worked the curve effect with the copy in a sort of semi circle, with the “point” moving towards “MoMA.” As MoMA points down it draws the eye to a right justified paragraph about the Artists Experiment initiative at MoMA, which also ebbs and flows, “pointing” left towards her sculpture.

 

In the second poster, I took her various interior works as inspiration for overlapping crescent moons, looking to create a slightly more explosive vibration of motion with graphics. Her 2011-2012 Form in Motion exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art gave me the idea of keeping the design strictly black and white. I layed out the curved graphics in a haphazard but ordered way to keep attention on MoMA which remains static along the same columned line as the information of where and when the lecture will take place.

 

References:

Hadid, Zaha. Cirrus. 2008. Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, USA. Zaha Hadid Architects. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.zaha-hadid.com/design/cirrus/

 

Hadid, Zaha. Form in Motion. 2011-12. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA. Zaha Hadid Architects. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.zaha-hadid.com/design/form-in-motion/

 

PROGRAMS AND EVENTS. (n.d.). MoMA. Retrieved May 19, 2014, from http://www.moma.org/learn/lectures_events/exhibitions#course21105