Monmouth Museum
CREATIVE DIRECTION AND EXHIBIT DESIGN FOR A CHILDREN'S MUSEUM
CLIENT:
Monmouth Museum, Lincroft NJ
ROLE:
Creative direction, exhibit design, environmental graphics, installation
SCOPE:
Four exhibits designed, three more overseen
YEAR:
2021 - 2023
Monmouth Museum is a children's museum in Lincroft, New Jersey. As Creative Director I designed four of its exhibits and oversaw freelance designers on three more.
The largest was the Garrett Reisman Center for Air and Space, a permanent wing named for the New Jersey native and NASA astronaut. I planned the layout, set the design scheme and created its identity, and worked with the education team on which topics each exhibit would cover. I coordinated installation and held the relationships with Reisman's team and the NASA artifacts team. The exhibits I designed opened to visitors in 2022, ahead of the center's grand opening in June 2023.
Alongside the exhibits I designed the museum's marketing across social, email, print and direct mail, and worked on gallery shows: layout and hanging, signage, shipping and handling of artwork, and coordination with artists and insurers.
THE APPROACH
A patch, not a logo.
The Center teaches the science of air and space travel and aims to inspire the next generation of New Jersey STEAM innovators. Its identity had to be credible to the subject and legible to a child.
I based it on the classic NASA mission patch. The craft inside it are Reisman's own, the plane and the shuttle he flew, so the mark carries real history rather than a generic space motif. A patch marks the start of a journey for a crew. Ours is printed large at the entrance, where it does the same thing for a visitor heading into air and space history.
Walk them through
the process.
The aquaponics system stands in open floor space, visible from every side. There wasn't enough wall or hanging space around it for the information the system needed, and more signage would have blocked the view in.
I used the floor instead. Each panel sits directly beneath the component it explains, so a visitor walking 360 degrees around the system reads the process in the order it actually happens: pipe, filter, pump, grow bed. It also puts the copy at a child's eye level.
One wall, two jobs.
This wall stands behind a dinosaur nest children play in, which gave the graphic two jobs: teach, and set the scene.
I built it as an infographic instead of text panels: large iconography and callouts, readable in the few seconds a child gives it before moving on. At wall scale the same piece becomes the backdrop to the nest, so the exhibit and the play area are one thing rather than two competing for the same space.
THE OUTCOME
Seven exhibits across two years, four designed and three overseen. The Garrett Reisman Center for Air and Space opened in 2023 as a permanent wing of the museum. The work is still installed.