THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY BROCHURE
Sophomore Class Project
Ever since watching 'Night at the Museum' as a child, I have been fascinated with dinosaurs. This museum brochure project was the perfect chance to incorporate my personal interests into a professional brochure for the American Museum of Natural history (AMCH).
Each section gives a brief description of the people it represents, encompassing the six main characters of the movies who are a reflection of the most popular exhibits in the museum.
Created using Adobe Illustrator. Illustrations created in Procreate on the iPad Pro.
Above: Museum Brochure Mockup
Above: Museum Brochure Laid Out Mockup
Above: Museum Brochure Thumbnails
My thumbnails for this project helped me decide on my layouts very easily, largely because I had already created indications for different elements (Logo, Photo/Illustration, Text, Title) and kept in mind the layout of both sides. This helped me group characters with intertwined or similar stories, while also separating them into plausible sections of the museum that a visitor may want to visit.
I ended up changing some characters as I went on to create my drafts since I had tried to cram in too much text with the characters I had initially considered. Reducing the number helped space out the information more and thus make it much more digestible.
I find myself using primary colours a lot, which was reflected in this poster as well.
Above is the first iteration I created after my thumbnails had been approved. There was a lack of the colour red that I had used for my 'The Cowboys' and 'The Romans' illustrations, which made those two characters feel a lot more disconnected to the rest of the characters displayed on the brochure. There was also a lot of white space everywhere, which can be used intentionally in many ways, but in this case was more of a hindrance to the success of the piece.
And here is the final version of the brochure, which in my opinion is leaps ahead of the draft. Looking back at it a semester later, it is easy to see inconsistencies in layout and hierarchy that I now know how to solve after taking a class focusing on typography, but overall the use of the primary colours as full backgrounds successfully sections off each character while also looking cohesive together. The white text that introduces each character is usually the area of highest contrast on a page, making it easy to read despite its verticality, and the simple cover with a repeated illustration is a lot more successful than using an image as I had in my drafts.
