Myself and a fellow graduate of Fine Art decided to take a trip to London to view both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. During this trip I was heavily focusing my attention on the branding and marketing of the locations signage, for inspiration for the design of the arts app font.
I didn't want the font style of the app to be a distraction to the information on the app, so the signage for exhibitions would be a really good reference point.
Tate Modern examples
I noticed for the contextual signage of a specific section of Tate Britain that mentioned the supporting organisation 'Bloomberg Philanthropies', they used a black font colour instead of the logo's normal depiction of purple, to keep consistency of the signage and to make it seem part of the text instead of a logo that was added on afterwards.
While the organisation's font is a serif font, which contrasts with the sans serif typography of the other signage within Tate Modern, the consistent sans serif continuation with the subtext and information meant that the serif font did not seem out of place and intentional with the sponsor's name seeming like it is just a title.
When looking for this font style on Adobe Fonts, I managed to find a very close similarity to Bodoni URW, from URW Type Foundry which is a German Company.
When viewing Tate Modern especially I noticed that the regular signage would consist of the exhibition section at the top, followed by the artist, a description of their work and contextual information and at the lower left corner it would credit the curator of that section of the exhibition. This would be all formatted with the same font style, however, the size of the letters and how bold the words were dictated the priority. For example "Curated by Helen o'Malley" was in the smallest font size. While the title, exhibition area name, and the first paragraph of text are all in bolder fonts.
However, while this is kept minimalistic for you to focus on the artworks themselves, I really did appreciate that when needed the signage would be altered to keep the piece of art as intended to be viewed, such as with Edward Krasiński's signage.
They could have done something similar to Tate Britain's exhibit that we viewed by Heather Phillipson; ''RUPTURE NO 1: BLOWTORCHING THE BITTEN PEACH" which I documented in the images below.
Tate Britain had placed the signage outside the exhibition due to the large scale installation's darkened space and sensory experience would not be suited for the signage.
However, due to the different experiences and the fact that the room was not only still light but it had a lot of white space. Tate Modern decided to design the signage for Edward Krasiński into the background, by using the standard white background and minimal design, it meant they could add a blue line through the signage to make the signage just a background for the artwork itself. In doing this the audience is able to not have a disrupted experience by a piece of signage blocking a segment of the work, but while actively viewing the work they are able to view the context while flowing through the work.
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