Emily Lessard
Yale University School of Art

Mutter Museum Identity

Biography: Emily Lessard received her master's degree in graphic design from the Yale University School of Art in 2005. She has a BA in photography from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she studied under German photographer Ingeborg Gerdes. She received an award from the Art Directors Club in New York City for a series of posters in 2003, and an award from the Society of Publication Designers for magazine design for Palimpsest, a collaboration with designer Willy Wong. Her most recent digital revival typeface design was showcased in a Louise Bourgeois monograph printed by the Harlan & Weaver lithography studio in New York.

When not working, Emily likes to read celebrity/fashion magazines, wear striped articles of clothing and listen to 80’s music.

Objective: The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is a medical museum specializing in pathological medical conditions. I created a new identity proposal for the museum, complete with a new typeface, icon system and style guide. The cover size of all museum material corresponds to typical hand length and breadth of American females. The cover paper is always one of 10 colors reflecting the rich variety of skin tone found in the world community. The icons were intended to replace clinical, verbose titles (spina bifeda for example) in the museum signage with easily understandable images.

Tools used: I used Adobe® InDesign® for all the typography and page layout for this project. I also used Adobe Illustrator® to draw and create the icons. For a series of subsequent posters, I used a laser printer as a chance-mutating device by randomly printing poster compositions on top of one another.