In collaboration with the museum shop managers and the design team, we developed three core lines of merchandise. Each of these included hard and soft goods such as magnets, pencils, stationery, apparel, tote bags, hats, etc.
The core line showcases the brand, using the logo and work marks as the central graphic elements.
The second line uses secondary elements connected to the museum which help to further define its identity. These include a slogan, “Contemporary Since 1862” and the museum’s address typeset in AKG’s custom typeface.
The third line is a continually evolving selection of works from the museum’s art collection. This line highlights some of our more well-known works, chosen by the curators.
Creating merchandise is always so rewarding because it requires the collaboration of many people with differing creative strengths.
To start out, the shop manager gave me a list of products that they had sourced and some directions that they wanted to explore which roughly laid out the three previously described collections.
We then used the sourced products to create digital mockups, exploring many products in seemingly endless color variations for each of the three collections.
We chose our favorites and put some others on the back burner for later development, and from there I began to create the production files. Working with a local screen printer, I set up vector files for him to resize and stencil to each product.
