Designing for Gallery Nights
Joining this program in its second year, Gallery Nights had a distinct look and feel. The first cohort designed handmade typographic posters that were textured and looked offset printed with high contrast imagery, and one to two colors. The direction we took for the branding of Gallery Nights was an extension of those design choices. I partnered with Allison Olson and Something Special Studios to develop a design system that our cohort could utilize, and would also benefit future cohorts.
Creative Director: Kamauri Yeh
Design Support: Allison Olson
Design Agency Support: Something Special Studio
Cohort One moodboard created by Michael Spoljaric.
We wanted to maintain the look and feel the first cohort had established, therefore a natural evolution was to create a set of highly textured gradient that could be paired with typography and imagery for expressive moments like posters and on the web experience.
Screen printing and block letters was the obvious aesthetic for the logo mark, including a subtle ‘printed’ swoosh in the letter A as a nod to the brand. We also used block letter and typewriter fonts to establish a type hierarchy and a silver print effect on high contrast imagery, overlapping the gradients to really punch up texture for loading screens and hover states on the website.
Poster mockups exploring typography, photography, and illustrations. Developed by Something Special Studios.
Loading screen mockup exploring silver printing and texture. Developed by Something Special Studios.
The Web Experience
The ultimate goal for the Gallery Nights website is to cultivate the benefits of their community by providing access to information and resources. “If you can see it, than you can be it” was something that was said often when planning programming. It’s a space to have inspiring and thought-provoking conversations.
The site serves as a directory of creatives, as well as an archive of those conversations. Visitors to the site either are tuning in for live programs or they’re looking for creative inspiration. Therefore, the homepage needed to function for those two states—one for live programing with optimal video ui and second for exploring previous programming and guests.
Scenario 1: Visit for live programming. Optimal video ui that follows user throughout the site.
Scenario 2: Visit for creative inspiration. Directory ui with multiple views and filters.
The Gallery Nights website is live but is only accessible by the internal community at Nike.