53. STUDIO BLUE
When Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery expanded the parameters of its biennial exhibition from local artists exclusively to include those in Ontario, Ohio, Eastern Pennsylvania, and Central New York, the gallery’s communication needs grew commensurately. Designers Garrett Niksch and Renate Gokl of Chicago’s Studio Blue were assigned the task of representing the work of 84 artists from 13 galleries in two countries as a unified whole.

Fittingly, their design system references geography itself. Using the page grid as a metaphor for borders, Niksch and Gokl placed text referring to Western New York artists within the two blue rules that border nearly every page. Information about artists outside of Western New York sits, quite logically, beyond the blue rules. But it is the cover of the 164-page publication that pushes the concept of boundaries to its limits. As if too large for the margins of its own book, the exhibition title, Beyond/In Western New York—spliced in half by a dramatic, black forward slash—spills into the inside front cover.
Tiffany Meyers