A model city

Identity and exhibition design for a crowd-sourced project

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Convened by the Boston Society of Architects, Maketank is a creative, noisy, chaotic confraternity. Strange and wonderful things hatch in this forum of New England’s designers and makers: life-sized origami furniture, a pavilion built without using a single nail, luminescent concrete. Its most ambitious project yet is a crowd-sourced city model made of 3-D tiles printed by fabrication shops and architecture offices across the region.

What this clamorous group needed was a little bit of order.

Ummo’s identity for Maketank is, at first glance, an exercise in restraint, a crisp mark set against a limited color palette. But like the client group it’s meant to represent, the mark is restless. Its lines snap to an asymmetric grid, forcing resulting variations into constant flux: an arched brow, a leaning chair, a mythical landscape. A counterpoint to the spindly line weights of the mark, typography is a brawny extended sans serif. Ummo’s image standards also help bring discipline to visual materials sourced from various sources.

Maketank’s new identity finds another iteration in the design of “City Print,” the exhibition surrounding the crowd-sourced model. Defined by rigid gridlines and minimal colors, it brings order—if only temporarily—to the spirit of creative chaos that defines Maketank.

ContrastThe spindly, restless lines of the “M” mark are contrasted by a wordmark set in heavy extended type.

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Project

Identity and exhibition design for a crowd-sourced project

Client

Boston Society of Architects

A model citizen

Ummo partner Matt Uminski is no stranger to models; he spent years shrouded in glue and sawdust while earning a Master of Architecture degree.