Avant Garden 2016, Walker Art Center

Some materials from the identity designed for Avant Garden, an annual benefit at Walker Art Center, that supports the Walker’s artistic and educational programming.

The identity for Avant Garden (AG) 2016 is based on the Walker’s outstanding architecture, which has many unique construction elements such as skylights, windows, and slanted walls

The design process started with gathering images of the building and architecture plans. I outlined the windows and skylights from the images and filled them with a pattern similar to the rainbow terrazzo/marble stone used on the Walker’s floors. This flexible pattern used at various scales evokes associations with confetti and the various architectural elements of the Walker’s interior architecture. The colors are taken from diverse aspects of the building and from the new acquisitions in the lobby and Sculpture Garden.

The chosen serif typeface, Gletscher, balances the playful and illustrative feeling of the architecture-inspired pattern, giving a more elegant feel to the identity. Developed by Heavyweight Studio from Czech Republic, Gletscher is very geometrical with sharp and strong serifs, similar to the angles used in the Walker’s architecture. The proportions between the thin and thick elements of Gletscher’s letterforms successfully balance between modern and classical, between known and new. Each character is wide and airy, reflecting the new building at the Walker, which will be constructed with floor-to-ceiling glass allowing a view of the surrounding landscape. The secondary typeface, the sans-serif Dia drawn by Schick Toikka, relates to the diagonals used in the dramatically sculptured ceiling skylights.

Combining these two typefaces and a new Walker window-terrazzo pattern makes the identity of Avant Garden 2016: modern, elegant, exiting.