Agency/ Studio
Move(e)able Type 2030
Moveable Types 2030 is a fictional visual identity for a retrospective exhibition on the history of typography, presented by the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in the year 2030. It’s both an exercise in speculative branding and an attempt to use the limited language of graphic design and design fiction to try to understand something about where our culture is headed based on what it seems to value today.
The set-up for this project is simple: design a visual identity for an exhibition held by a credible and well respected cultural organization, but with a twist: it doesn’t actually exist and it takes place in the year 2030. In this respect, the “design” and “branding” is really an excuse, or maybe more accurately a language, through which we can both ask questions about today and map those answers onto a possible tomorrow.
In the case of Moveable Types, what we’re asking is: “how do we treat our cultural institutions?” And more broadly: “as a society, what do we value?” “What does that end up costing us?”
The Moveable Types identity envisions a world where funding for the arts and the institutions that preserve and present it continues to dwindle. Widespread austerity and privatization is the name of the game and cultural institutions have to work overtime groveling for patronage and corporate sponsorships. This is the basis for Moveable Types’ gaudy, radical riff on a visual identity; something hollowed out almost completely, leaving room only for advertising, save for small strips of black space for what little information can still exist within all the clutter.