Turner Prize 2008

Exhibition Graphics, Printed Material and Publication

In its 25th year, Tate felt it was time to commission an identity for the Turner Prize that represented the artists’ work and reflected its reputation as the UK’s foremost contemporary art prize. The identity combines an adapted ‘Prize’ version of the Tate typeface, and a logo is used in combination with images of the four nominees’ work. A visitor’s comments room featured cork walls for visitors to post their comments, and badges featuring the name of each artist were available free in the exhibition so the public could take their favourite as a way of casting their own vote.

2008 Turner Prize nominees: Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga, Cathy Wilkes

Credits: Furniture design by Michael Marriott

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Turner Prize 2009

Exhibition Graphics, Printed Material and Publication

The second year of our work on the Turner Prize continued the identity we had created for Tate in 2008.

2009 Turner Prize nominees: Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer, Richard Wright

Credits: Furniture design by Michael Marriott

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Turner Prize 2010

Exhibition Graphics, Printed Material and Publication

In 2010, our 3rd year of working on the Turner Prize exhibition, Tate wanted to move the comments room for Turner Prize into the digital age. We collaborated with associates Hellicar & Lewis to create a ‘Twitter wall’ in the gallery. The original cork notice board became a live comments feed projected onto the gallery wall from visitor’s SMS messages or ‘tweets’ that continually updated and scrolled as you watched, sometimes creating comments and debate among visitors in real time.

2010 nominees: Dexter Dalwood, Angela de la Cruz, Susan Philipsz and The Otolith Group

Credits: Furniture design by Michael Marriott

Twitter wall in collaboration with Hellicar & Lewis

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Turner Prize Publication

Alongside our redesign of the identity for the Turner Prize that we created in 2008, the Tate's publishing department asked us to redesign the broadsheet that was sold to accompany the exhibition. Taking a lead from the new image-led identity we featured the 4 individual artist images from the poster campaigns on the front of the book, and reduced the format of the publication to a smaller piece with a greater page extent, to feel more like a short exhibition catalogue than a magazine.

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Tate Guide

2008–2010

The Tate’s cross-gallery, bi-monthly what’s on guide re-launched with the June/July 2008 issue. When briefing us to re-design and refresh the guide, Tate described it as their ‘single most important piece of print marketing, and a key communication tool’. Our aim was to make the guide clearer, simpler to use and more contemporary in its feel.

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Epstein

Publication

Jeremy Deller and Paul Ryan approached us to design a publication with them about the life of the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, which would be an artwork as part of the exhibition Liverpool, Centre of the Creative Universe. We combined the typography of the signage on Epstein’s parents shop front (where McCartney bought his first guitar) with the familiar language of novels and guidebooks. This was homage to Epstein, whose lifetime in Liverpool is often forgotten. A pile of publications formed a tall but decreasing gold column in the gallery, and the public were invited to take copies away with them.

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Tate Games

Printed Material

We designed a number of free print-based interactive games for children at Tate Modern, in collaboration with illustrator Anthony Burrill. They included: Building Explorer, in which children take on this explorer role by wearing the pop-out yellow hard-hat provided and making drawings with the pop-out cardboard ruler and protractor as they are encouraged to investigate the gallery; and Art Inspector, which plays on the officialdom of inspectors in English institutions. The children identify which artists in the galleries are breaking the Art Rules – and use their sticker sets to make up their report.

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The Long Weekend

Printed Material

The theme of the four-day UBS Openings: The Long Weekend festival of performance, films, and music at Tate Modern was ‘Do It Yourself’. Inspired by the Arte Povera and Post-minimalist artworks we developed a new ’stencil’ version of the Tate typeface specifically for this event, and for the publicity campaigns used our new logo in combination with archival images of the original 1970s Robert Morris installation at the Tate.

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The World as a Stage

Exhibition Graphics, Printed Material and Publication

This Tate Modern exhibition was a group show of artists whose work investigated ideas of ‘theatre’ and performance. Because this was a group show, one artist’s image could not be used to represent the whole exhibition; so having researching printed theatre ephemera from 1900s to the present day, we created a graphic identity and visual language for the show. In the publication we created ‘adverts’ for each of the artists – several of whom had performances, events and off-site installations – these appeared in the publication and then as billboards that ran in the café.

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Heimo Zobernig

Publication

Heimo Zobernig's simultaneous joint show between Tate St. Ives (UK), and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Modern Art Centre (Portugal), involved a mixture of previous work, artworks from each of the institutions collections, and new work created in response to the galleries that highlights how his curatorial methods are as important as any artwork being shown. Furniture, such as the display cases, became artworks in their own right. The publication can be read from each end, taking one of the two exhibitions as a starting point with photography we commissioned of the installations, until they meet at the centre with the object information.

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Heimo Zobernig and the Tate Collection

To accompany the first of the two exhibitions (at Tate St Ives), we produced a small publication putting Zobernig's practice in context. Referencing works from the Tate Collection alongside his own, it emphasised the varied disciplines his works cover. Alluding to the video art he has been a proponent of from the outset of his career, the cover text is constructed like an RGB display, and a fluorescent green is used a highlight throughout.

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