Made in Japan

“Made in Japan” was an immersive visual journey through Japan’s golden age of graphic design, told through posters. Curated works from the Merrill C. Berman Collection ran the gamut from century-old to recent design.

Our exhibition design for Poster House took inspiration from geometric shapes found in Nihon Buyö, a poster designed by Ikko Tanaka, a godfather figure in Japanese graphic design history. A triptych of oversized title walls unfurled like a Japanese folding fan to greet visitors at the entrance and create a permeable exhibit space to carry them seamlessly through the exhibit timeline.

We wanted an immersive motif to accentuate the posters and create a visual through-line for all the posters designed in the last century.

We chose color hues to serve as thematic backdrops for each section of the gallery. These vividly colorful shapes started small but quickly became larger as one progressed through the exhibit, finally becoming larger than the gallery walls.

Oversized typography—inspired by lettering found on the ships that brought Japanese immigrants to the American continent—infused the exhibit with a sense of industrialization and globalization, two forces that greatly influenced the evolution of graphic design in Japan.