Deconstructing Patterns: review by Grafik

London-based creative studio, The Beautiful Meme, explore the intersection of art and science in their campaign for a new exhibition at The Francis Crick Institute.
Deconstructing Patterns poster design

We caught up with TBM Creative Director Tom Sharp to take a closer look…

What was your starting point for the design, and what inspired you to work with microscopy in this way?

“Our campaign leads with the line ‘The discovery of a lunch time’, and TBM are always looking for interesting ways copy and design can work together. From the beginning we’d been thinking about creating designs on a microscopic level.”
 

Talk us through the techniques used to create the headline type, and how you developed it with scientists at the Crick Institute…

“We worked collaboratively with Ravi Desai, a research scientist at the Crick, and begun by testing different methods of creating and capturing the type… To create the advert, the headline type was 3D printed with a 100 micron depth. Working closely with Crick scientists under laboratory conditions, the headline template was flooded with fluorescent beads. The letterforms were then studied and photographed under a microscope before introducing the colours used to map patterns in cell dynamics.”
 

What are the most important and interesting things you learned during the process, and has this project made you think differently about the way you work?

“We learnt an awful lot about the specific scientific techniques used, but more generally collaborating with scientists allowed us to work in a way that was part design process and in part science experiment. We had to be very adaptive to the results of the process, and allow them to define our approach to some extent. By combining both artistic and scientific processes, this collaboration was really a microcosm of the topic of the exhibition itself, and both parties learned a lot from it. “

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