The 57th Carnegie International took years to make. Curator Ingrid Schaffner divided that time into three phases: Truss for the lead-up, Fuss for the exhibition, and Catenary for the archive and send-off. We gave the identity and even the exhibition’s name a different form for each.

Truss used the abbreviated “Carnegie Int’l 57th Ed. 2018” and recycled materials from earlier Internationals, overprinting the old collateral and reusing the website. We commissioned a monospaced version of Christian Schwartz’s Produkt and kept it at one size. Capitalization, spacing, and hyphens doing a little amateur structural engineering kept things organized.

For Fuss, the name expanded and the typography loosened up. Ingrid’s phrase was “museum joy,” which allowed for a certain amount of flourishing. Large truss-like structures carried the title and exhibition texts, connecting the graphics to the architecture underpinning Pittsburgh. The pocket-sized Guidebook, modeled on Baedeker travel guides, introduced visitors to the city as well as the exhibition.

Catenary pulled the identity back into an archival format: CI 57–2018, with a naming system intended to bring earlier Internationals into line, too. The Dispatch returned to Produkt, now in variable widths and mixed with Christian’s Graphik. Each successive section is set in smaller type, gradually receding into the distance.