Designing a trilingual exhibition identity about jazz photography across distancesBranding, Exhibition Design Spring 2026
Overseen by Becca Leffell Koren Introduction
Measured in Distance is a fictional exhibition that answers a question embedded in the act of jazz photography: does the distance between a photographer and their subject change what the music feels and means to people? To explore that question, the project brings together the work of three photographers, Hermann Leonard, Guy Le Querrec, and Hozumi Nakadaira, whose images of American jazz musicians reveal three distinct spatial relationships. The exhibition identity, designed with English, French, and Japanese in mind, translates those distances into a trilingual typographic system where spatial composition and line work carry the conceptual weight.
The identity is defined by each of the three photographers and their spatial relationship to the subject.
In the American photos, the distance is close and immersive, in the French photos, there is a clear subject and background composition, while in the Japanese photos, the space between the subject and photographer feels liminal and confusing. In order to capture the thesis that the subjects of the photography remain the same while the distance between subject and viewer changes, I employed the use of simple graphical lines and three-dimensional spatial composition from a singular point to showcase the differences in distance.
The type choice chosen for this exhibition identity was Noto Serif JP—restrained yet beautiful letterforms that behaved well across all three languages. Many different typefaces were explored during development, looking at ways to differentiate English, French, and Japanese from one another, but they quickly overwhelmed the nature of the exhibition. To keep things restrained and better emphasize that distance not difference is the one factor shifting between the three languages, the system was simplified to Noto Serif JP alone.
measured in distance
mesuré en distance
距離で測る The motion teaser for Measured in Distance is based around the concept of zooming out
—gradually revealing the different photographers, their photographs, and the spatial relationships between them. Each movement is carefully considered, building toward a final reveal of the exhibition. The score, Miles Davis’s Blue in Green, was chosen for its clean, delicate feeling and the snappy rhythm it lends the piece.