Rock label Redesign

CLIENT: Museum of Science, Boston

CHALLENGE: My challenge was to redesign the labels in the outdoor Rock Garden exhibit. The old ones were falling apart, hard to read, and confusing. We needed new labels that looked better, had clearer content and were more legible.

DESIGN STRATEGY: I worked with a content developer here at the Museum to create a new label system for the Rock Garden. The most important change that we made was dividing the information up into more digestible chunks. There are now separate and consistently placed sections for the name of the rock, the origin and age, the body text and the specific things to look for. So instead of one big paragraph of text on the old labels, the new ones have many visual cues to help lead your eye around the graphic and pick and choose which information you want to read.I also designed icons to represent each of the three types of rock. Each label has an icon to identify which type of rock it is, and the icons help to explain the phenomena that cause the rocks to form. The icons are explained in more detail on the intro label.I chose to use a dark background with light text so the labels wouldn’t be too reflective in the bright sunlight (since they are located outside) and made them slightly over-sized to cover up the ragged edge of the stands.