WOMEN IN MUNITIONS
Melbourne's Living Museum of the West | University Project
Timeline + Supporting publication design
This project brief required us to engage with the archives of the Living Museum of the West to design a timeline suitable for display within the museum park.
The proposed direction focuses on the role of women in munitions, specifically, the women who worked at the Colonial Ammunition Factory, which was at the forefront of ammunition production during World War I. The objective was to highlight the narrative of women munitioneers and their significant contribution to ammunition production while simultaneously recounting their experience working at the Factory.
In order to break the monotony of the monochromatic imagery, the design is a marriage of pops of red, black & white imagery, and subtle beige textures to produce a collage-like aesthetic. The timeline has been supplemented by an A4 poster book. This secondary deliverable would give interested visitors the opportunity to purchase the collection when leaving the museum. However, more importantly, it would provide people who are unable to visit the museum, access to the same content without compromising on the overall experience.
The decision to incorporate a rolodex-like element was inspired by the abundant imagery available on the topic. It attempts to integrate an interactive model of communication, counterbalancing the information-heavy timeline.
The layout of the poster book has been designed with the poster on the right-hand side page and supplementary information pertaining to the poster on the left-hand side page. In order to ensure that the information of the next poster is not affected when tearing the poster, photographic break spreads have been inserted after each poster.
The proposed binding type is Adhesive Binding/ Perfect Binding, a cheap and time-efficient method of binding. Although aesthetically thread sewing would have been preferred, a major deterrent was that the page spread has to be folded, making it difficult to tear the posters without affecting the binding.
