Van Gogh Museum Poster

Poster for the Van Gogh Museum Website Size: 16.5” × 23.4” {A2} In the summer of 2009, led by Professor Jon Sueda, fifteen students from CCA travelled to the Netherlands. Our aim was to get a first hand look at the process behind the amazing body of design work created there. We visited a number of design studios, from small-scale one-person powerhouse studios like Karel Martens to larger establishments such as Studio Dumbar, type laboratories such as Underware, schools like Rietveld Academy and Werkplaats Typografie. We had the privilege to participate in workshops conducted by talented designers at Catalogtree and Wout de Vringer. This poster was produced at the workshop with Wout. The idea behind the poster is based on the fact that the architecture of the museum is very striking and the building is rather iconic of the museum. Flickr photos of the museum always show people standing against it to commemorate their visit. The building is also very modern in contrast to the works it holds. I came up with the idea of exposing this contrast by substituting everything but the building in a photograph with elements from Van Gogh’s paintings (The museum’s primary attraction lies in the fact that “the museum contains the largest collection of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh in the world”.) This odd juxtaposition simultaneously brings to fore both the building and the trademark strokes of Van Gogh. Since we had no access to scanners and other sophisticated equipment while in Netherlands, we had to get innovative. I built this entire poster by stitching together screen shots of the most high resolution photographs of the museum and Van Gogh’s paintings that I could find online.