One of my favorite projects while working at the Petersen Automotive Museum was creating an internal catalog for their 2019 exhibit Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction and Fantasy. The catalog was to be used for archival purposes and gift to lenders as a memento, and I saw the opportunity to make it more splendiferous. Since I am a big movie nerd—I mean fan—I was ecstatic to work on it. Unlike 95% of all requests, I had a little more time to focus on making this piece more splendiferous than just a standard catalog listing all the vehicles and artifacts of the exhibit. (Cover illustration by Guy Allen)
The exhibit theme consisted of vehicles and artifacts of movies from a dystopian society. Since the movies ranged from Mad Max: Fury Road to Blade Runner, choosing a dystopian style for the catalog wouldn’t represent all of the different societies. Instead, I realized the one element they all had in common was the need to escape the burdens of dystopia. With that, I structured the book to be a survival manual.
Below: I created these custom icons for each chapter/section (in order from top left: Foreword, The Exhibit, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Comics and Manga, Exhibition Checklist, Acknowledgments).
Below: Color scheme establishing easier identification and searchability of chapters.
Below: Along with creating the chapter icons, I created a legend for the key information most all vehicles shared to keep promoting the manual/guide style.
