Vancouver Art Gallery - Picasso

Vancouver Art Gallery - Picasso Exhibition

O V E R V I E W & K I C K O F F

Picasso: The Artist and His Muses was the Vancouver Art Gallery's blockbuster summer exhibition of 2016. One of the most recognized names in art history, brought to life across an entire city. The marketing suite needed to match that scale, spanning gift shop posters to street banners across downtown Vancouver and over the Granville Street Bridge.

Working as part of a design team, I contributed to the full suite of marketing materials, bringing care and craft to every format across an extensive and highly regulated production.

All artwork was supplied by the Picasso Administration in Paris, along with a strict set of guidelines governing how it could be displayed. Nothing could be cropped without the full image also being shown. Background and border colours required approval. Every piece went through a formal review process before going to production.

Working within those boundaries made the creative problem more interesting, not less. Colours were pulled directly from the hero image, a striking vertical portrait, and woven into the typography so the name and exhibition details felt like they belonged to the artwork. A handmade typeface echoed the feeling of paint and artistic craft. A clean sans serif carried the practical details. Everything was chosen to harmonize with Picasso's work rather than compete with it.

T H E W O R K

S E R V I C E S

Graphic Design & Print Production

Marketing collateral design

Large format and environmental design

Typography and colour application

Institutional stakeholder production process

The city street banners presented a specific challenge. Showing the full portrait within the banner left the image too small to register from a moving car.

A crop of the iconic image was the stronger choice: immediate, recognizable and impossible to miss.

We made it work by referencing the full artwork below, a solution that satisfied the Picasso Administration and made the banners more powerful and memorable, which is exactly what you want from your marketing materials.