Completed window at the MoMA Design Store midtown Manhattan location
The MoMA Stores have devoted our New York retail windows to feature a very special little product, a product “big enough” to be included in the Museum’s own design collection. The windows include larger than life-size objects that flicker, move, and spin through the technology of littleBits, tiny circuit boards with specific functions engineered to snap together with magnets. Read more
Although there are a million typefaces to choose from, MoMA Design Studio chose to only use one typeface for the majority of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition identities. Why?
MoMA Gothic typeface. Typeface designed by Matthew Carter
At MoMA, we are tasked to design roughly 40 different title walls each year to accompany a wide variety of exhibitions. To manage workload, we made the decision four years ago to have two-thirds of the workload “templatized” by sticking to one typeface—our house font, MoMA Gothic (which is based on Franklin Gothic)—for all collection rotations. Read more
It’s always exciting to try new things as part of MoMA’s graphic design team. In the case of Applied Design, the new Department of Architecture and Design exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody, we got to challenge ourselves by using technology featured in the show to program a moving, dynamic title wall. Read more
When MoMA’s graphic design team first started working on the newest MoMA Art Lab, I already knew how successful the designs for past Labs had been (and was kind of intimidated to work on one). Unlike most of the exhibitions we work on, the Labs are interactive spaces where kids and families can explore and play while learning about art hands-on. Read more
We are very proud to announce that MoMA has acquired a selection of 14 video games, the seedbed for an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future, as well as for a new category of artworks in MoMA’s collection that we hope will grow in the future. This initial group, now installed for your delight in the Applied Design exhibition the Museum’s Philip Johnson Galleries, features: Read more
MoMA Design Studio‘s little designer, Sky Chu. Photo by Martin Seck
A few months ago, my team and I here at MoMA had the challenge of designing the title wall for the exhibition Century of the Child: Growing By Design, 1900–2000, a broad survey of 20th-century design for children with “children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking.” When we met with the curators, Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, they suggested trying a less formal approach for the design of the title wall, perhaps using handwriting. So two of our experienced designers spent two days experimenting with every type of handwriting font and non-digital handwriting they could think of. The results were good, but not quite right. It was clear to us that we needed to take a different approach. That’s when we suddenly realized, what could be better than having an actual child help us? And that’s how my 6-year-old son Sky became a MoMA designer. He sat down at the dinner table one night, wrote out the title of the exhibition three times, and then said, “done.” So it was. And after we enlarged the text, we realized the average letter height is as tall as Sky himself—3 feet, 9 inches!
The little designer leaping in front of his work, and one of his own alphabets. Photos by Martin Seck and Ingrid Chou
Jens S Jensen. Boy on the Wall, Hammarkullen, Gothenburg. 1973. Gelatin silver print, 9 7/16 x 11 3/4″ (24 x 29.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © 2012 Jens S. Jensen
The first major research trip we undertook for Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 was, appropriately, through the historically child-centric Nordic countries. It was then, in 2009, that we first encountered Jens S Jensen’s 1973 photograph Read more
In 1972, while platform shoes, waistlines, and the first recorded Pong scores were high, a young boy in Norway was feeling, literally, pretty low. Read more
Cover of the Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 publication
On the cover of MoMA’s new book, Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, two boys decked out in astronaut suits hold onto their Space Hoppers. Read more
Imagine you have never been to a museum. Any museum. Now imagine that you are visiting your first museum, and it’s MoMA; it’s also your first visit to New York, to the United States, and—most importantly—you are visiting to see your own art work on display. Read more
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