Creating the Exhibits for the Museum

by Rochelle Parry

Creating the exhibits involved multiple steps and much collaborative effort.

Design

I wanted the exhibits to all have a similar look and feel, so I needed to create a design that could be adapted to multiple sizes and varying content. I enlisted the help of my assistant, WWU student Nick Santos, to create a banner design. He chose Pristina text for the titles, with images on the right and left ends that faded into a background color block. These colors and imagery would vary with each exhibit. The title block was then centered horizontally over a color block that would span the entire length of the exhibit.

Software

At first I tried to use Adobe Illustrator to create the exhibits, but with the amount of text formatting necessary, I found AI to be ill-suited for the task. The best software for the creation of such large layouts and mountains of text was Adobe's InDesign. InDesign allowed easy formatting and reflowing of text, and text and paragraph styles to ensure consistency throughout the exhibits. I used Adobe products on a Macintosh G5 power pc running Tiger 10.4.

Translation

All text on the exhibits was presented in both Thai and English. The translation was performed by students at the University of Washington. The Thai font (I chose Thornburi) had to be manually moved into a specific folder on my hard drive in order to display in InDesign.

The Thai language text is very diffrent from English: there is no punctuation, and the line breaks mattered. This meant that in addition to proofing the English text, another round of proofing by a native Thai speaker after the Thai text had been inserted was necessary. Nimnual Boe, who owns the Thai House Restaurant in Bellingham and is also the sister of Pong Lim, who donated the museum space in Khao Lak Thailand, generously donated her time to proofread. Each exhibit required multiple tiled prints on tabloid sized paper for this purpose.

Size of Exhibits

The size of the exhibits was determined by the wall space and structure of the building. Being able to only see a small part of the document at full size on a regular computer screen made these exhibits a challenge to work on. Recently ATUS had provided an Apple Cinema screen to complement my 19" monitor, so I was able to view the exhibits at more than a postage-stamp size.

Printing

Printing these large documents required some special handling. At take-up spool would have helped with this project, but most posters created on this machine are only a few feet long. When the paper falls into the tray, the weight of a large print can cause the edges to buckle, resulting in unsightly dimples in the paper. Allowing the paper to roll on a protective surface on the floor, instead of the tray, made for easier handling. Scheduling prints that took 1/2 hour to produce during the busiest time of the quarter merits special thanks to the flexibility of the Student Technology Center staff. The exhibits were then taken off campus for laminating, and flown to Thailand for installation.

In addition to the large exhibits, 30 tabloid-sized exhibits were created for presenting personal stories of relief workers and affected Thailand residents. These were printed on an HP Color Laser Jet 5550dtn, and laminated within ATUS, with text in both Thai and English.