Royal Ontario Museum
Categories: Marketing Materials
Project Description: The Magic of Indigo Blue was a unique fundraising event presented by the Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) Textiles and Costume Committee. The event was a celebration of the ROM exhibition, Touched by Indigo: Chinese Blue-and-White Textiles and Embroidery. Royal Ontario Museum turned to Rossul Design to create a catalogue for the exhibition.
The Challenge
The unique nature of the exhibition’s subject material dictated that Rossul Design develop a design that would support the show by providing additional information to visitors interested in the function and aesthetics of the blue-and-white textiles and embroidery of China.
The Plan
The plan was to create a catalogue design that provided ROM visitors with additional details about the exhibited pieces as well as the history of the textile in China. The catalogue had to be informative but also work as an advertising collateral that would bring more people to the exhibition.
The Design
Rossul Design opted for a landscape format, a more unusual format for museum catalogues. This allowed us to integrate informative content with exhibition photographs, in a way that showcased both. Many of the images we had to work with were of very low quality and needed to be edited pixel-by-pixel in most cases. Rossul Design changed colours as needed to provide a cohesive, top-quality aesthetic.
The Result
The new catalogue received very warm feedback from exhibition visitors and helped the ROM by working as an alluring marketing collateral.
Theme-Inspired Palette
With the help of ROM staff, we carefully researched the colours and created an exquisite colour palette that was connected to the subject matter.
Subject-Focused Design
Each page focused on one of the pieces from the exhibition. We embedded the image into the text in a harmonic way that created a unique composition on each page while still preserving the layout consistency.
Pixel Level Image Editing
Due to the nature of the exhibition, many images were really low quality. We had to edit them one-by-one to assure consistent quality representation throughout the catalogue.