Identity System: Final Deliverable

So the end finally comes for my time with the People of the Triangle and might I just say, it's been a long and exciting journey. For the Smithsonian exhibit, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to explore an area of Polynesia that I have yet to explore. For majority of the semester I've been using my projects as means of teaching others about the general culture, but for this project I wanted to make more of a statement. My exhibit focuses on how tourism, beginning with European colonialism, hurts the authenticity of the Polynesian culture. Formally I explored this concept through the juxtaposition between photograph to represent the authentic culture and my icon set to represent the tourist culture. The knocked out figure in the photograph that interacts with the icon illustrates the fading of the culture.

Key Process Moments:

Here are some of the preliminary steps that led me to my final direction. For instance my decision to further explore the tourist aspect of Polynesia with the knockout usage was inspired by the first image below from Round I. The manner in which the photography interacts with the icon was inspired by the third image below.

 
The title of the exhibit was one areas that I was constantly struggling with throughout the project from the actual rendering to it's application. This was an important moment for me because it reminded me of the typography can allude to the concept formally and even work as a means of branding.

These last two process moments helped shape my final visual decisions. Initially I had planned to move forwards with the illustration version because it was more formally resolved and had more variety the photographic version, but later in my process I was not pleased with them. This step taught me how to stop, look back in my process to find decisions that worked and didn't. I realized that the banding and patterning were the most successful part of the illustrative version while the striking aspect of the photography in the other version was successful. So I decided to combine those two elements to create a more powerful combination.

Final Proposal: