As co-art director and lead designer on the opening campaign for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, I helped develop a strategy with my team for the best way to execute ads across a wide variety of formats. Working with our head multimedia producer to lay out a visual style, and our editors and communications team we created consistent visual and written messaging.
Our main goal was to of course let people know that we were opening after three years of construction. Secondly, we needed to inform the audience of the museum’s name change from The Albright-Knox Art Gallery to The Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Thirdly, we wanted to present the new brand by giving the stage to the logo and word marks, color pallet, and photography style. After a lot of sketching, meetings, and deliberation, we decided that the best way to accomplish all these goals was to create a very modular visual system.
Like Legos, we could have a few different key pieces to build and rebuild according to the ad format and needs. These pieces included the logo and word marks, a set of photographs, and a tagline.
We first started planning the broadcast commercial, storyboarding specific shots that would highlight the new museum and the experience visitors could expect to have. We planned to take still photos as we filmed, so that we could tell a consistent visual story across all materials, no matter if they were in motion or printed. This storyboard became our anchor for everything else and gave us a solid foundation to build on.
It is also valuable to note that during our project timeline the campus was still under construction and would be right up until opening day. So what would normally have been a very doable photoshoot was in reality a hefty logistical feat to accomplish. The final images you see here are the result of meticulous set design, expert camera positioning, and hours in photoshop.
If you’re going through the trouble of creating a whole new museum, you should probably tell people about it! This is what we were thinking when we developed the AKG’s opening campaign.
Working with the communications team, we secured a large amount of advertising spots. Some of these included forty print ads in publications local to New York State, as well as in national and international sources such as The New York Times (pictured to the left), Artforum, Juxtapoz, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Beyond print ads, we also executed digital ads, billboards, broadcast commercials, and radio ads.
During the opening campaign, we released a series of digital and printed billboards. The digital boards came first, and had two two-week phases: a tease and a reveal. During the teaser phase, the boards would cycle through variations of the logomark to develop interest and introduce the dynamic brand. The reveal phase would be a static screen with the full name of the museum as well as the opening date. Together, the digital boards introduced the brand as a whole as well as communicated vital information.
During opening week is when the printed billboards were fabricated. From a messaging standpoint, the goal of these was to communicate that the museum was now open under our new name, and to show some of the experiences you can have there. Our target audience was every single member of the local community, so we were very conscious about casting a wide variety of people to ensure that everyone could feel welcome. From a brand perspective, the goal of these was to shed the "tuxedo" core black and white pallet of the brand and really lean into the responsive color aspect and bring in a feeling of playfulness and excitement.
