From 1950-1975, Chicago-based Container Corporation of America ran a campaign known as the Great Ideas of Western Man. The Design Museum of Chicago was encouraged to reimagine this campaign and thus Great Ideas of Humanity was created with the goal of embracing the increasing globalization of the world. Great Ideas of Humanity celebrates the resulting cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies, societies, and cultures. For the campaign, designers create a list of “great ideas” and then create a visual response. Great Ideas of Humanity has been exhibited several times already. The goal of this project was to design a brochure that would highlight these previous exhibitions. This brochure would be shown to potential designers and/or sponsors that might want to participate in the next exhibition. For more information on the Great Ideas of Humanity campaign, click this link to go to the Design Museum of Chicago's website.
The challenging aspect of this project was that I had to design the pamphlet to be very concise, informational, and attractive for potential investors in the project. I needed to include history about the Container Corporation of America and the Great Ideas of Western Man campaign. I also needed to include information about the previous Great Ideas of Humanity exhibitions. All of the imagery and text needed to be conveyed across eight spreads without being overcrowded. Overall, it was challenging to design something very informative and straight forward while also maintaining visual interest.
My solution was to mimic the style of a previous Great Ideas of Humanity exhibitions, called Out of the Container (depicted above). I wanted the cover and a few of the internal pages to imitate the GREAT IDEAS wall featured in the exhibition. I knew that I definitely wanted the brochure to have some of that bright red color of the wall, so I decided to use it as a background color. I didn't want the bright red background to make it difficult for the viewer to read the text, so I decided to use it mostly with the images. I also chose to make one of the pages in the spread light gray rather than white because it was a lot easier on the eyes and complimented the rest of the color palette nicely.
In terms of the typography, I followed closely with the guidelines of the Design Museum of Chicago. They use Regular for most of their type and like to heavily ident the first line of each paragraph. I continued this typographic style and made sure to use various weights and colors to enhanced the importance of certain areas of the text. Overall, I wanted the brochure to reflect the beautiful design that the Design Museum of Chicago had already created as well as be legible to the viewer.