Salon Wall

salon-wall

Ford Food and Drink generously hosts a rotating exhibit space for tenants of the Ford Building. This month, it’s Fat Pencil Studio’s turn to strut our stuff on the salon wall. Preparing the exhibit was a great chance to review our work, spiff up old projects, and consider how our technical graphics might appeal to a general audience. After combing through the depths of our project archive, we settled on four groups of images, each of which represents our mission to SHOW (as apposed to TELL). The image sets describe their subjects at a variety of scales, juxtaposing the specific and the general.

In the first set, the mechanism of a threaded coaster brake is dramatically expressed in four 3d diagrams that we retouched for this show. Beneath that, two of our Portland bridge models–Broadway and Burlington Northern Railroad–gleam in the virtual sunlight of Google Earth, and are located on a custom-styled city map. Next, our building-related work is represented by a series of highly-detailed 3d graphics we made for the Oregon Garden Fire Safety House. It was fun to recast these in a different color palette to better harmonize with the other images in the exhibit. And finally we curated a group of images from the extensive set that we produced for the Seattle Streetcar expansion project. These illustrate four different parts of the comprehensive street redesign, revealing the project team’s efforts to comfortably accommodate cars, mass transit, pedestrians and cyclists together along a major urban thoroughfare.

Thanks to Ford Food + Drink for hosting the space, Arakawa Hanging Systems for providing the means to hang the boards, and Pushdot Studio for their excellent-quality printing and mounting.

Ady Leverette was a designer and a principal at Fat Pencil Studio between 2011 and 2018.