The City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri is a museum full of surprises. It is a hands-on museum filled with tunnels, slides, buses hanging off buildings, animals, skywalks, and so much more. The goal was to create a poster for the City Museum that could be adapted to two other platforms. The poster was a general advertisement to visit the museum and is adapted to a sidewalk billboard and a city bus.

 

The intended audience for the poster was everyone who would take a second to examine the poster. The museum is geared towards children but can be very exciting for adults to visit. The tagline for the poster is “See the World with a Childlike Imagination” to expand the audience beyond children and to entice adults to escape their stressful lives and to play like a child again.

 

The City Museum has a wide variety of exhibits and attractions, so much of the research conducted was learning what all the museum had to offer. The website was the hub of research for this project; the brand of the museum is very well established and fits great with the vibe of the museum, so being able to capitalize on the existing brand was a huge factor in the design decisions of the project. One of the main elements of the branding for the museum is torn paper and collage art. This was the cornerstone for the structure of the project and the rest followed suit. Eventually, it was getting so crazy, that David Carson became the main style inspiration for the project, which elevated it to the next level.

 

Being inspired by the collage style of the City Museum’s branding, the concept was formed by the incredibly weird and nonsense collage created at the beginning of the process. The elements used in the collage were inspired by things one would see at the museum, which when put together and thrown into a city scene, was so bizarre that it resembled a child’s imagination. And thus, the tagline “See the World with a Childlike Imagination” was born. 

 

This poster is in collage style, which uses various forms of imagery, and is very type-heavy. The type is used to expand the imagery-based collage beyond its frame. The other main element of the paper is torn paper which is inspired by the City Museum website. The poster is adapted to a sidewalk billboard, so that the audience can get up close and personal on large scale, and it is also adapted to a city bus.