Rhode Island School of Design Grad Show 2024

Context

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is one of the world’s leading arts and design institutions. Each year, the school mounts a show featuring work from the graduating class of MFA students.

Challenge

For RISD’s 2024 exhibition, the school wanted a new way to showcase more student projects without over-emphasizing specific students. Prior years featured only a few selected student artworks, so the new objective was expanding that pool without requiring strenuous effort from the curatorial team. Furthermore, the school wanted to draw more connections between student artworks to demonstrate a cohesive community across all majors.

Solution

As the designers of the school’s 2024 exhibition, our primary goal was to find a way to highlight numerous student artworks that still felt visually cohesive even if we placed less emphasis on curatorial consistency. We achieved this by taking inspiration from Anni Albers’ quiltwork and creating a digital patchwork pattern out of student artworks. Rather than showing artworks in full, we zoomed so closely into each image to reveal the artwork’s component colors.

Our identity and website featured custom code for randomly selecting student projects, arranging them into a grid, and gradually zooming in and panning over each image to create a dynamic virtual textile. The exhibition’s website features these patterns across all of its pages, ensuring that every visit is captivating and unique. For the exhibition’s logo, we created a custom version of Velvetyne’s pixel font FT88 that enables the individual pixels to shift up and down in alignment with the dynamic patterns.

No Replica’s work on the project included a poster generator with an interactive interface for saving PDFs at a variety of print sizes. We generated dozens of posters and placed them around RISD’s campus in grids that revealed the variable identity system.