Design for museums

In the last decade, activities and events around museums, cultural centers, and exhibition design gained momentum. Designers working with two-dimensional graphic design met the third dimension and began to practice with tools such as time, sound, light, movement, interaction and multimedia. Consequently, classes in Exhibition Design were integrated into education programs. In exhibition projects, graphic designers began to work in areas that had previously been irrelevant to the advertising sector, like art, literature, photography, architecture, science, and archeology. By moving to these new areas, they began to collaborate with different fields of specialization. In the meanwhile, exhibition catalogue design developed as a fertile area.

Before the ‘80s, culture, arts and education was under “state monopoly”. Privately-run galleries, museums, cultural centers and educational institutions were non-existent. In the ‘80s, the private sector began investing in these areas. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts led the way for the private sector to enter into the cultural arena. Firstly banks and then large corporations began to organize cultural events, and set up museums, cultural centers and publishing houses. The state monopoly of university education was terminated and private universities came into life. In the 2000s this accelerating growth also opened a new opportunity of employment for graphic designers, outside the advertising sector.