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The Design Brief: Medieval to Digital

As our project continued to grow, it seemed like new ideas were becoming actionable plans every day. This was undoubtedly exciting, but we quickly realised that because we operate largely in our specialised groups (Exhibition, Media, and Website teams) we faced the problem of stylistic cohesion between the teams. We needed a creative design brief, a concise document that outlined the styles, colours, materials, and requirements that would be universal in our project. A simple but vital example was matching fonts and colour scheme throughout our social media posts, exhibition, and website.

In a previous in-class brainstorming session we developed profiles and objectives for the project. We answered key design questions including:

-Who is our audience? Who are our contributors?
-What are our main objectives?
-What is our budget?
-What is mandatory for our project? What is supplemental?

Once we established the answers to these questions, we had a clear direction. We were ready to start producing —but first, we needed a cohesive design.
We knew our audience: exhibition guests would be students, faculty, and enthusiasts and what they shared in common would most likely be their residency (live in Ottawa) and their interests (enjoy medieval things, museums). It was important to address these in our design of both the physical exhibition and the website.

Ottawa residents would likely be drawn to the fact that the manuscripts and folia in our collection belong to an Ottawa institution, Carleton University. Therefore, the logo of the institution will feature quite prominently. Exhibitions tend to draw in visitors both young and old, and accessibility concerns were a major factor. We chose neutral dark tones (black, dark grey) and with white to provide the high-contrast needed for colour-blind visitors and those with eye-strain (after all, students and professors spend a lot of time looking at screens!). For our accent colour, we built a colour palette with coolors.co using a scan of one of the folio to be exhibited. The result was a beautiful variant of blue called lapis lazuli (#26619c) which was serendipitous following this article that came out earlier this year.

There were limitations to what we could accomplish with a wordpress site, but thankfully through reclaim hosting we were able to get access to some premium plugins. After a  crash-course refresher, I was able to manipulate the wordpress CSS (the style sheet used to style an html page) to give us the desired fonts, colours, and frames.

It was also important to have a contingency plan in our design brief in case key elements of the website did not work. For example, if we cannot create an instantiation of a Mirador viewer on our site, it was important that we have a backup plan for how to display our scans and their respective metadata.

Although we cannot anticipate all the roadblocks we face in designing both an exhibition and a website, a design brief is a great place to start. Not having the budget for a user-experience test, we stuck with tried-and-true styles and fonts in order to have as little error as possible. That being said, it won’t be perfect and feedback is always welcome.

—Kate Brasseur, Website Team Leader

Interested in watching the website go from bare-bones to exhibition companion? Follow our progress here!

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An update from Emily

Hi everyone,

I hope all of your individual projects are progressing well. It has been a while since I last blogged and I figure a little bit of an update is overdue. I have been assigned to the physical exhibit team for our final project. Last week I was tasked with documenting the measurements of the exhibit space we are going to put our artefacts inside. So I created a diagram with the measurements of the spaces we are looking at in the History Department and shared it with our group.

This coming week I am going to select another manuscript to display in the exhibit, along with another one that I had previously chosen. I am then going to write out information cards for each of the manuscripts I have chosen and share those with my team for further feedback. In addition to these tasks, I am in charge of determining which objects we put inside the display case to accompany the manuscripts. These objects are going to relate to the manuscripts and our class in one way or another, and I am going to write out information cards to be paired with each one.

Talking about our tasks in class yesterday made me realize just how close the exhibit launch date is (It was exactly a month away). This also got me thinking about how much has to be done in order for everything to be ready for the launch date. This is somewhat stressful, but I think we will be able to manage it well. Things are moving at a much faster pace these days and everything is getting very exciting!

See you in class!

EJG

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Curating an Exhibit

While we enter the final 6 weeks of course, and begin racing full speed ahead, I thought I should reflect on our final project a bit more. More specifically, I wanted to take you all on a journey which I call Curating an Exhibit. Luckily for us, we have a physical and digital space. Throughout this blog posting I encourage you to reflect critically on the spaces that we have and think about what aspects of this we can include within our exhibits.

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When curating an exhibit there are many questions that we must ask ourselves. Lynsay did an amazing job highlighting these during our conversation today regarding a design brief.

Who is our audience?

What do we want them to know (when they come to the exhibit and visit our website)?

How can we engage them?

What purpose to they have (and reason) to want to visit our website?

What items will make them want to come to the exhibit?

Who are our stakeholders and how do they influence our exhibits?

Similar to writing a paper, as curators we have an intention which we can call a thesis. This thesis is one that is persistent throughout the entire exhibit. It is an underlying theme or message that guides and influences our work. This doesn’t have to a repeated phrase or even mentioned within the exhibit itself but we as the curators must remember this within our work. This thesis will inspire not only us, but the visitors as well. This can be related to Marc’s question of “how do we reach a target audience that is beyond the notion of ‘people like us’’? If we identify our target audience, we can then identify those who exist outside of it? Why would those people be interested in our exhibit, and how can we intentionally build those ideas into our framework?

In order to truly be successful with this, we need cohesion across all the teams. My role as the project manager to assist with this cohesion. If you are waiting for something and the other team has past the deadline, my job is to help the team and you while we waiting. We must be transparent and trust each other in the different areas.

Here are the list of dates and deadlines that we discussed in class, with a few extras and adjustments. Remember if you are unable to complete a task by the deadline, do not worry! Just communicate and let everyone know.

February 28: Finalized Exhibit Layout (Hard deadline, March 2)

March 1: Design Brief for Website (After reviewing exhibit layout) (Hard deadline, March 3)

March 3: QR Codes (Information on how to make them gathered)

March 5: List of all content required for website (Hard deadline, March 8)

March 8: 3 poster designs created and ready to be printed (Hard deadline, March 10)

March 20: Website Beta ready to launch (Hard deadline, March 25)

March 21: Pamphlet created (based on exhibit and website) (Hard deadline, March 26)

March 22: Exhibit set-up (Hard deadline based on change of exhibition dates)

I will be adding more deadlines to Trello based on the tasks that everyone is completing. Remember if you are unsure please ask, and it is better to overshare than underscore in a group project!

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Online Exhibition Readings

I hope everyone has enjoyed the mini break we’ve had, whether you got to soak up the sun in a warmer destination or if you were more like me and stuck in the snow with school work, either way I hope everyone is feeling slightly more relaxed after a week off. The readings this week were like a breath of fresh air for me; I am not a technical person, and the previous readings we’ve had have been on the “techy” side and I’ve found them difficult to read. This week’s readings, however, perfectly ties in to our final project that the class has been working on. Kathy Fox’s The Design Brief focuses on giving the reader on what to do and what not to do when beginning a large project. It offers the idea of what exactly to do, before the project even really begins, meaning “all the people involved with the project come together before the project goes outside the institution and decide the organizational ambitions of the project, along with its values and ethos”. The Design Brief will be the structure for our brainstorming in class Monday. The other readings are focused mainly on public history; which is more or less engaging the public with history, such as explained in Public History and Liberal Learning: Making the Case for the Undergraduate Practicum Experience by Elizabeth Belanger where she has her students engage directly with a community and their history. Andrew Dunning’s review of Jeffrey DeWitt’s on-running project for transcribing Petrus Plaoul Sentences and making them more widely accessible is very relatable to what our class did last semester with transcribing some of Carleton’s medieval manuscripts (not to his remarkable scale though). The work the Harry Ransom Center has done with attempting to transcribe or identify partial manuscripts was quite wonderful and relevant to our whole course – most of the manuscripts we worked on were only fragments.

Here are some questions to ponder over this weekend before our class:

  1. Do you think the Design Brief will help us with our project? Why or why not?
  2. What do you think are the strengths/weaknesses of a physical exhibit? An online exhibit?
  3. What are some of the obstacles of publishing work online to be seen and commented on? (see Andrew Dunning’s review and the work done by the Harry Ransom Center)

Enjoy the last two days of reading week!

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Keys to Success

Having (almost) complete four years of university I marvel at the fact that I have gone so long without a professor in any of my classes assigning a group project. This has meant that, for most of my university career, the only assessments I have submitted were individually-based essays, exams and the rare solo presentation. Due to this past experience I will admit that I came to this group project a little nervous but it is actually a refreshing change of pace. With this context in mind I would now like to outline what I have learned thus far as ‘Team Leader’ for the exhibit portion of this project.

The first key takeaway I gathered concerns the importance of scheduling. This means setting a clear deadline for when each team member has to finish a component of the project. The nature of the exhibit means that it is not something we can piece together the week before our launch date—the mere thought of this procrastination makes my hair stand on edge—rather it is best to break the project into little tasks that reduce this endeavour to manageable stages. As the type of person who needs to assign herself deadlines for completing work it was not too much trouble, in consultation with my teammates, to figure out a rough timeline for the exhibit. For example, on March 1st I hope our team will have come up with the content we would like to discuss in the exhibit as well as reach a firm consensus on all the pieces and objects that will go into the display case. Though this may sound like a large goal hopefully the upcoming reading week will provide enough time to accomplish this objective.

Another takeaway deals with the importance of communication across the various teams involved in this project. Not only it is crucial that the exhibit team members communicate amongst themselves but we should also keep in touch with the publicity and website teams to know what they have planned. As this exhibit is kind of a ‘spotlight on’ the manuscripts scholars, students and the general public can find on the website it is vital that we ensure our content does not overlap too much with this team. Also, as we would like people to actually see the finished product (the exhibit) it is crucial to maintain conversation with the publicity team. How can we expect the publicity team to get people excited for the exhibit if we keep all our information about the display to ourselves? Communication between every member in the Medieval Book team is vital for success!

As a conclusion to this post I just want to take a moment to appreciate the research and work everyone put into their Omeka entries. In selecting manuscripts for this exhibit my teammates and I are able to draw on the information about the folios provided by our classmates earlier in the course. One of the benefits to this group project has been the ability to watch as the information learned in the first term contributes to this term’s work!