West Office Trip - Matthew Kuukka

The visit to West Office was amazing they seemed to be a very large scale design firm. There presentation was very good showing their process and how they come from the initial clients calling them all the way to following up on the instillation of the exhibits. The office was very impressive in how it looked and the layout and organization of how the teams worked. I liked that no one had a permanent desk and that they moved people around into smaller team depending on skill sets and projects needs. They drawings that were on the wall were also very nice and my favorite thing from the trip, to bad we couldn’t take pictures of it. Overall a great trip and gives great ideas about how the exhibit design industry works.

Project Six Mauk Design Matthew Kuukka

Mauk was a really cool design firm, it is amazing how small they are and how much work that they do. They do some amazing work that is not just limited to exhibition design showing how diverse they are and capable of almost any type of design work. It was also cool to get some insider knowledge about what things were made from and how simple some of the most amazing looking things were. That the main thing I took away was that things should be kept simple and try to use existing things as much as possible.

Project 6, Mauk Design

Visiting Mauk design opened my eyes about the shear scale of being able to design a full exhibit at industry standard. The examples showed to us were extremely worth considering all the different aspects of exhibition design. 

One thing which surprised me was the size of the design team at Mauk. Considering the size of projects and the size of the clientèle their team is extremely small, So with the amount of man power and “cheap” labour as Mitchell put it we should be able produce a show to be proud of. The work shown to us highlighted the need for sketch models and strong graphics. It was interesting that he said that he used to do the graphics for some companies then designed the exhibit. This process is very much like how we are doing this exhibit. Starting from scratch and coming up with the whole concept. 

I was impressed with the amount of reference material they had, with regards to both magazine articles and material samples. Mauk seemed to be subscribing to all the major design magazines both here in America and also in Europe.