The Prada Double Club Miami
A graphic and web-experience design project for The Prada Double Club Miami in collaboration with Fondazione Prada— one of Italy’s leading art centers for contemporary art exhibits.
Lead Role In
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Quality Assurance
Project Length
5 weeks
Team
Oscar Waizel
Gracie Gu
Martin Curic
Chris Chan
Context
Web Design
Interaction Design
Typography Treatment
Tools
Figma
Photoshop
Premiere/AE
About The Exhibit
The Prada Double Club Miami was an experimental installation that once served as a fully-functional, ‘dual-experience’ club in December of 2017. The idea was birthed by Carsten Höller, a German contemporary artist who was eager to explore “two-sidedness”, creating a dual spaced club with their own (contrasting) audio-visual experiences.
The outdoor, ‘overground’, space radiates a tropical ambience filled with hyper-chromatic visuals and local Caribbean music. Meanwhile, the ‘underground’ experience has a much more different feel, featuring international music, DJs, accompanied by a monochromatic disco-esque theme.
The Brief + The Challenge
In the grand scheme of things (in order) we were tasked to:
-
Study designers, Dan Friedman and Ellen Lupton
-
Explore their qualities and principles
-
Analyze and understand these qualities and principles
-
Apply them into our own work
-
-
Make 3 graphic assets that accompanied the event
-
Tickets
-
Banners and posters
-
Anything that works
-
-
Design a microsite for the event
-
Get expressive, captivate our audience visually.
-
Surface the event, the artists, sell the vibe
-
Create a ticket purchasing experience
-
Event Tickets
Bus-stop Posters
First Iteration
Experimenting With Type
In the first week we were tasked with developing four lines of investigation based on the qualities of ‘radical modernist’ designer, Dan Friedman and design principles from Ellen Lupton's book — Graphic Design: The New Basics
I contributed in designing the explorations with indentation* (1) and kerning (3), using 'Baer' to drive the focus of the poster. My intentions were to create a jarring relationship between the figure ground and the type. However, I was told having a picture of a bear was far too literal, and though the typography felt clever, it was not enough to relay the essence of the exhibit.
It's important to note that before designing for The Prada Double Club Miami, we started with another, more traditional, exhibit— Who The Baer.
Our team designed this deck to breakdown the qualities and principles of Dan Friedman and Ellen Lupton.
Second Iteration
Delving Deeper
During the second iteration, I continued exploring the use of grid and layering, but this time with a newly introduced Lupton principle— texture and transparency. I tinkered around with the type and began getting experimental with masking techniques, offsetting the text, repeating, rotating and scaling it.
In the end, I came up with two out of the three new design directions— layering (1) and figure ground (2). My intentions were to subtly represent the rugged-playfulness of the exhibit by using textured images of pencil-sketches and crayon as the fill-in for the text.
Making the Pivot
From One Exhibit to Another
After two weeks of exploration with Who The Baer, we were still uncertain whether or not the event (along with our graphical assets) would translate well into the digital space. This is where we made the shift to The Prada Double Club Miami. Our team began thinking of ways to explore the notion of ‘two-sidedness’, music and color, all tied into an expressive web-experience. We thought it would end up offering more opportunities for engaging interaction design, especially because we could embrace the ‘Double Club’ concept as a visual identity or ‘pseudo-brand’ and begin designing around that.
Inside 'Who The Bær' Exhibit
Overground Plaza of
The Prada Double Club Miami
Final Iteration
Final Week of
Graphic Exploration
For our final week we really had to dial in and refine the look and feel of our art direction given that we were now designing our two last design directions for The Prada Double Club Miami. Carrying over what we learned from the qualities and principles of Friedman and Lupton respectively, we narrowed down our visual language to emphasize the elements of vibrant, contrasting colors, and principles of rhythm and movement.
For the final week of design directions, we had to create three different applications of graphical assets which would be used to promote the event. We chose to do a bus-stop poster, a ticket and a street-banner since they each posed varying constraints based on the dimensions and context of viewership.
First Design Direction
One Last Chance for
'Who the Bær'
This was the same direction we moved forward with since the previous iteration, Who The Baer. We just wanted to give it one last shot to ensure we were making the right decision in pivoting and thought that the visuals still showed a lot of promise. Though the end results were encouraging, they were better off as stand-alone pieces. This direction simply did not reflect the overall nature of the exhibit and therefore, would not translate as well on the web like the third directions did.
I took the lead on the creating the bus-banners while the rest of the team worked on the ticket stubs and making refinements.
Second Design Direction
Your Worth is
Not In Your Work
The second design direction was entirely my own. I felt confident in taking full control over one direction, eager to capture the energy of the local Miami scene with vibrant, contrasting colours and layered, off-set text to give the illusion of an 'electric' sense of motion.
However, upon receiving feedback, there was something about it that apparently didn't shine. Perhaps there were too many elements, colours, or ideas competing with each other. It didn't matter. The direction was scrapped and the gut-wrenching disappointment of 'wasted' work washed over me like never before— it wasn't the work that suffered, it was my expectation that everyone would love it like I did. Nevertheless, I had to move forward. I learned what it felt like to tie my worth to my work and take critique personally. It didn't feel good. It was a lesson that I vitally needed if I wanted to continue producing high quality work without surmounting amounts of self-inflicted pressure.
Third Design Direction
Simplicity is the Key
Our final design direction turned out to be the one we went forward with in the end. I credit my teammate Chris with birthing this direction. I later helped with the image treatment with the paper rip effect and overall details in typographical alignment and quality assurance.
Not only was it simple and bold, but it would translate well on the web; the repeated 'DOUBLE' made effective use of repetition and rhythm. This direction also gave us the versatility to capture the dual essence of the club as seen with the two contrasting versions of the poster. The biggest takeaway for me was letting others in my team take the reigns and take control over the project which ultimately helped everyone.
Interaction Design Phase
Applying our foundations of graphic design into a event micro-site web-experience
↓
I contributed to direction one and two in the image and video curating/treating process, hover animations and prototyping.
Interaction Design Directions
In a similar fashion to the previous week, we developed three directions as a web experience. This week was not about having it all figured out but more so about getting comfortable with interaction design and prototyping. In the end each design direction would end up ranging from most functional to most expressive. At last, after a generous amount of feedback and critique, the second direction seemed to strike the best balance of functional and expressiveness I was still very intimidated of what was to come. We still had to design an entire micro-site and we had nothing more than a week to build the entire experience— we didn’t even know where to start but we knew we at least had a very promising concept to build off.
Hover Interactions
↓
Crafting the Web Experience
Just as Carsten Holler had intended, we wanted the web experience to express the duality of the club, showing a strong contrast between the ‘overground’ and ‘underground’ experience. In order to achieve and express such contrast, it was important to communicate the ambience of each space. Together, the entire experience needed to feel like a club, radiating the suggested ‘schizophrenic’ energy that Holler had often intended for his audience to feel.
We wanted to make the audience feel like they were already inside the club.
Surfacing the Artists
Personally, I come from a Latnix background (Mexico), which is why the artist page was one of my solo contributions. I felt I held a deeper understanding of the musical genre and cultural tone of the event and wanted to leverage this to really set the tone. By showcasing a mixture of dominantly Latinx artists, I curated this hypothetical line-up as it balances genres that would nicely accommodate the 'Double Club' format; where the sounds of r&b/hip-hop artists would belong in the clandestine, calming underground experience, the more vibrant and lively sounding artists would shine in the colourful, overground scene.
In terms of the interactions and art direction, while the user hovers over the artist name, a preview of where and when the artist is playing is shown on the right-hand side. Each image is accompanied by a tinted overlay (warm or cool) to subtly communicate the tone, location and date of when that artist is playing.
Ticket Page
↓
Reflections and Takeaways
I thoroughly enjoyed the process and results of this project because it was the first time I got to experiment with expressive visual design, art direction and prototyping micro-interactions at a larger scale. Since most weeks were being run in a sprint-like format, the pace of the project challenged me to push myself week after week; something I had no experience in doing. In hindsight, I should have managed my expectations when a contribution I made wasn't included or didn't go my way but this was vital in learning to not take design critique too personally.
The most vital takeaway was learning how to decide on something without looking back and trusting that whatever work was done was not for nothing. As a team full of perfectionists and overachievers (especially myself) we often got stuck in one design direction and ultimately that lead us to rushing the final site for the Double Club. Nevertheless, the result was one that I was invaluable and room for improvement will inevitably exist.