The Ropeworks Museum needs one calm, legible design system that carries a visitor from the entrance panel through fourteen wall texts, roughly 120 object labels, floor numbers and a four language leaflet without ever feeling like four different projects. The system has to work standing in dim, listed-building light, survive a volunteer adding label 121 next year, and read as warm and human rather than clinical, because this is a story about workers, not just rope. Positioning: heritage information that is easy to read, easy to maintain, and quietly proud of its subject.
Overview & Goals
- Build one typographic and grid system that scales cleanly from a 3 by 2 metre panel down to a 70 by 50 mm label
- Guarantee readability at 1.5 metres in poor ambient light for every wall text and label
- Rewrite existing content into consistent, plain, four-language-ready copy blocks
- Hand the museum a template and a rule sheet a volunteer can use unsupervised to produce future labels
Budget & Timeline
The design system is agreed in September, all artwork is delivered to the fabricator by mid-November, and the exhibition opens to the public in February, so the schedule leaves no room for a second design round once fabrication starts.
Print production
- Format
- Introduction panel 3000 x 2000 mm. Wall texts 600 x 400 mm. Object labels in 150 x 100, 100 x 70 and 70 x 50 mm. Leaflet A5, eight pages.
- Where it's used
- Displayed
- Print run & paper
- One of each panel and label, direct printed on 5 mm Dibond for the walls and on 2 mm acrylic for the labels. The leaflet is 20,000 a year on uncoated 120gsm.
- Content
- Exists, needs rewriting
- Finishing
- Matte lamination
- What exactly
- A complete exhibition graphics system: one 3 x 2 m introduction panel, 14 wall texts of about 200 words, roughly 120 object labels in three sizes, floor numbers for the route, and a four-language A5 leaflet. Plus the templates and the written rules a volunteer uses to make label 121.
Target Audience
General museum visitors, a large share of them tourists reading in a second or third language, moving through a dimly lit heritage building at their own pace.
Style
Colour
Direction chosen
Warm & inviting
Terracotta, amber and sand. Feels human and hospitable.
Examples of the mood, not the colours anyone has to use.
In the client's own words
We are a small museum in a former rope factory, opening a permanent exhibition about the building and the people who worked in it. What we need does not have a name in any design list we have looked at: the wall texts, the object labels, the numbers on the floor, the leaflet in four languages, and the one large introduction panel at the entrance. It has to be one system, it has to be readable by somebody standing up in poor light, and a volunteer has to be able to produce a new label when an object moves.
Scope & Deliverables
- Entrance introduction panel
- Set of wall text panels
- Object label system in three sizes
- Floor numbering for the visitor route
- Four-language A5 leaflet
- Rewritten exhibition copy in all languages
- Reusable templates and a written label rule sheet for volunteer use
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Set every wall text at a size proven readable from 1.5 metres in the museum's actual, dim lighting
- Give volunteers a template and rule sheet they cannot break when producing new labels
- Design labels that work with text alone, since most objects have no photograph
- Keep the system consistent from the 3 by 2 metre panel down to the smallest label
Don't
- Do not set a light typeface on a dark ground for anything longer than a heading
- Do not design any label that depends on a photograph being available
- Do not fix anything to the original brick, the building is listed
- Do not create a system so bespoke that a non-designer cannot extend it