I just recently returned from a trip to Washington, DC which seems to be, in my mind, the museum capitol of the world! It’s a wonderful city and I found lots of interesting sources of inspiration for my design work. One that I wanted to share came as I visited the variety of museums around the city. It would seem obvious that you could find inspiration in the master works of classic painters, but what I really noticed was in the design of the museums themselves. All of the plaques, posters, captions, and videos are designed to convey small bits of information quickly for people who are walking from case to case and from exhibit to exhibit. They have to be very direct to get the visual and written message across in such a small amount of time, much in the same way that a well-designed presentation to an audience has to be.
The take-away for me was this: if you are needing some inspiration for designing an upcoming presentation, take a trip over to your local museum and see what kinds of things they do to solve that problem. You’ll find a wealth of type and image combinations that are effective at drilling right down to core information while still giving meaningful insight into what you’re learning about. If you happen to go to Washington, DC, I highly recommend the US Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Ford’s Theater to see really effective museum design in action!
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