Queer Justice: 50 Years of Lambda Legal and LGBTQ+ Rights
Our studio collaborated with The American LGBTQ+ Museum and Lambda Legal to create Queer Justice: 50 Years of Lambda Legal and LGBTQ+Rights, a traveling exhibition that will tour cultural centers in six major American cities.
The Challenge
For half a century, Lambda Legal has defended the rights of Americans across the LGBTQ+ spectrum from decriminalizing intimacy among same-sex partners to upholding the personhood of queer youth and their families.
Project Vision
The design is rooted in an impassioned aesthetic of picket sign activism and protest, centering the people at the heart of every major queer rights case in U.S. history with a collage of bold graphics, original illustrations, and archival imagery. The exhibition amplifies the heroism of Lambda’s plaintiffs and attorneys, while also emphasizing the tangible impact of legal advocacy on the lives of real people.
The panels are designed to travel to six locations across the United States, with their component dimensions optimized to fit every elevator, hallway, and doorway in those locations.
Isometric Studio
A combination of paint, SAV image reproductions, cut vinyl text, and clear vinyl cutout shapes create a vibrant, dramatic, yet nuanced visual narrative.
Isometric Studio
Design + Execution
The traveling exhibition is designed as a set of five moveable carts, each of which comprises layered panels arranged on posts that rise above an ash wood base—evoking the visual of picket signs. The exhibition architecture flexibly adapts to the needs of multiple sites. The panel system is designed for efficient assembly and transportation, while also creating an emphatic sense of place as it activates each traveling destination. The front and back of each cart are symmetrical, resulting in a design that appears cogent and organized, and not overly complicated. For the exhibition’s visual identity, we designed a custom typeface, Lambda Sans, based on the headline of a 1970s flyer by the GayActivists Alliance. The flyer explains the significance of the lambda symbol to the LGBTQ+ movement, describing it as “an exchange of energy…a peoples’ will aimed at common oppressors.” The typeface adopts the raw, hand-carved aesthetic of the flyer headline, deploying select oblique characters and ligatures that create visual tension and energy in the composition of exhibition section titles. Bold, saturated colors and illustrations inspired by LGBTQ+ symbology further amplify the didactic content.
We developed spatial layouts showing the panels in all six locations. When an unrelated event needs more space, they can be rolled on wheels to the side.
Isometric Studio
City-specific timelines were designed to be changed out in each location, noting specific local contributions and honoring local heroes.
Isometric Studio
Paragraph text is always accessible at eye level for standing and seated visitors. The custom title typeface we created, Lambda Sans, gives the exhibit a sense of energy and specificity.
Isometric Studio
Curator Lauraberth Lima, and the lawyers at Lambda Legal worked very carefully to ensure that every image and each section of text honored the struggles and progress over the decades.
Isometric Studio
The museum has organized workshops and programming in all six cities, inviting people to celebratein built form a history that very often is only passed down in personal stories.
Isometric Studio
Project Details
A great example of strong graphic design and color bringing otherwise static and flat content to life. With an absence of any artifacts, the layered and angular panels work hard to create some dimensionality and visual interest, while also allowing for ‘flat pack’ transportation from venue to venue.
Inspired by picket signs, the design of this movable exhibition elegantly protests traditional exhibition standards through bold uses of typography, experimental kerning and reconfigurability. Designed as a touring exhibit, the flexible, rolling cart and panel system can be re-skinned and re-oriented to adapt to local narratives & spaces, while also creating improvisational containers for community engagement that bring the exhibition content to life through real-world inclusion & dialogue.
Design Team
Andy Chen (partner)
Waqas Jawaid (partner)
Paolo Fabbri (senior designer)
Abhishek Thakkar (architectural designer)
Kate McBride (content director)
Junyi Shi (graphic designer)
Jacob Lee (graphic designer)
Clara Angela (graphic design intern)
Isometric Studio (architecture)
Collaborators
Parz Designs (physical fabrication)
Full Point Graphics (digital fabrication)
Lauraberth Lima (curator)
Photo Credits
Isometric Studio
Open Date
November 2023