Former Graphic Arts student Nick Hill has just finished designing the inaugural show and accompanying book for Outside India in the gallery space at advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy’s new office in Delhi, India. Here he offers his reflections on the experience:
Outside India was first pitched back in November 2011 as one of the live student briefs and was set by Robert D’Souza. The initial brief outline was to create a concept for a book to accompany the upcoming exhibition of the same title that would be happening originally in September 2012. The identity for Outside India was inspired by shop shutters, which are ubiquitous around Delhi and also drew parallels with the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ theme that Ed was presenting in his artworks.
I worked on the project during my final major project but it wasn’t until after graduating that the book really started to build pace. Its has been a big learning curve for me, I was initially quite precious about the design that I had originally created but I learnt to lose that as the design had to adapt to new information and elements within the book. The content was being completed at the same time as the design and would change regularly, originally an 80 page book, now at 160 pages, this was probably the most valuable experience for me, to be adaptable and respond to the content, which I think is the most important thing when designing a book and in the end it looks much better and more consistent for it.
I also learnt a lot about project management as there were several different things going on at once — organising the exhibition, printing the artworks (some 4m x 4m) and designing the stuffed “Ambassador” vehicle, which would form part of the final show. Then the venue moved halfway through the project, so we had to accommodate a new and quite different surrounding but that was very much what “Outside India’ was about — turning it into something positive. Looking back on the exhibition I feel it is actually better in this new location. There was also a big delay 1 week before we were about to fly out to India to install the exhibition — it got pushed back to late November. On top of that everything in India seemed to take weeks longer to sort out (there is a lot of red tape in India!!). So overall both the project and myself have had to be very adaptable to changes.
Nick Hill