New York University approached the firm to design a time-line exhibit for their recently renovated Welcome Center, the official gateway for all visitors and guests of NYU. The primary audience is current students and prospective students, parents, professors, donors and alumni.

With a modest, fixed budget, the challenge was to design and install a time line that encompasses more than 200 factual entries, each of them illustrated, while emphasizing the narrative’s three-dimensional qualities along a narrow, constrictive space (34 x 8). Our final design uses the metaphor of an “exploded” book to tell the 175-year story of NYU from its birth in 1831 to the present, interpreting the university’s liberal approach to study as well as its explosive growth from three students to an approximately 50,000 current annual enrollment.

While the overall flow of pages appears chaotic at first, it gradually reveals a coded system of page formats that are aligned to the content, resulting in an engaging exhibit that delights and informs audiences about the University. For example, folded pages recalling a newspaper signify international and national events; book spreads are assigned to NYU-related facts; smaller, color-coded pages offer NYU “fun facts,” and framed oval portraits recount the sequence of NYU’s presidents.