Pop Art

Context

Team project — UI/UX Designer. Pop Art: Fabrics & Fashion was a team project for SFU’s IAT 438, built around a conceptual client: Textielmuseum Tilburg, a real textile museum in the Netherlands. The brief was to design a pre-event microsite for a fictional exhibition tracing pop culture’s fashion history “from Warhol to Westwood” — and, as the surviving material shows, the team carried that same visual language beyond the site into a matching offline campaign.

Textielmuseum was never an actual client. The brief used a real institution as the subject of a hypothetical, so the project had something concrete to research against rather than an invented museum with no real context behind it.

Research & visual direction

The team’s research ran in two directions. On the design-precedent side, Wolfgang Weingart’s Swiss/Basel-school poster work became the project’s central reference — its use of transparency to layer imagery, and carefully placed geometric elements to guide the eye toward visual hotspots.

On the subject-matter side, the team also worked from a real Textielmuseum-adjacent publication profiling Dutch textile and fashion designers — grounding the fictional exhibition’s program in an actual curatorial context rather than an invented one.

Developing the visual language

Typography

Two typefaces carried the system: Dunbar Tall for headlines, chosen for its extended, condensed letterforms and retro character, and Montserrat for body copy, for its clean, readable sans-serif lines. An alternative headline face, Bao Pro Bold, was compared against Dunbar Tall on terminal shape and x-height before being set aside.

Posters

Layout and color were explored in parallel — the same “Pop Art Fabrics and Fashion” content, tried across five distinct color and grid treatments before the team settled on the boxy, collaged look that carried through to the finished posters.

Designing the experience

The prototype wasn’t a single screen — the team mapped and built out three distinct structures, each documented as its own flow.

Ticket purchase

From the homepage’s Tickets link, the flow moves through a shopping-cart-style tickets panel, a billing-details form, and a confirmation screen with an order number and a barcode-style ticket — built out as a full checkout, not a simplified stand-in for one.

Home, About & Calendar

The main navigation connects the homepage to an About panel — labeled “Behind the Runway” in the prototype, with the exhibition’s itinerary and museum contact details — and to a calendar of exhibition dates, filterable by artist.

Artists

From an Artists list, at least one full profile — Vivienne Westwood — expands into dedicated Haute Couture and Punk + New Wave sub-pages, incorporating archival interview footage of Westwood herself.

Final microsite

The finished screens read as one interface system rather than a set of disconnected pages — the same collaged photography, the same “POP ART fabrics & fashion” wordmark, and the same Gestalt-driven layout logic carried across the homepage, the exhibition itinerary, the ticket-purchase screens, and individual artist profiles.

One thing visible directly in the screens, though never stated as a formal rule in the source material: each section of the site uses its own neon monochrome hue — lime for Home and the exhibition overview, magenta for the calendar, orange for ticketing, blue-violet for artist profiles.

Beyond the screen

The visual direction didn’t stay on screen. The same wordmark and palette were mocked up across real out-of-home formats — a transit shelter, a building-mounted banner, flags, and a mall escalator takeover — extending the microsite’s identity into a full campaign.

The poster itself went through several finished colorways rather than a single fixed design.

Reflection

This was one of the more formative projects early in my design education. It’s where typography stopped being an abstract choice and became something I could reason about at a granular level — spacing, terminal shapes, x-height — and where grids started to read as the invisible structure holding a layout together, rather than something applied after the fact. Adapting a historic reference like pop art into a working digital interface, through posters, font-pairing tests, and iteration, shaped how I still think about grid structure, color, and copy today.