Designing CCP Exhibits

Within the exhibits, you may find that it makes more sense to begin planning in sections rather than individual pages. This strategy can be helpful if you anticipate having multiples of a certain kind of page, such as many biographies or short sketches of relevant historic Black churches.

Every page in an exhibit should have a specific and distinct role in helping to accomplish the goals of the exhibit. Please write the purpose or role out in a short phrase. This step is easy to skip, but vital.

Add one or more multimedia elements to each exhibit page. An image, graph, or map can help break up long blocks of text. Even using a pull quote can help.

Why does multimedia help? When reading an exhibit, people need an opportunity to pause and reflect. Visual elements help create moments for reflection. Think about your experiences of physical exhibits. When we move between galleries and rooms, we have a chance to decompress and think more broadly about what we just saw. These moments of reflection, ultimately, allow people to put an exhibit into conversation with their own stories and voices.

Please indicate which student(s) will be responsible for building each page. Perhaps you can assign some students to take primary responsibility for drafting the language, creating the graphs/maps, and for building the page on WordPress. We are happy to discuss how to distribute the roles in a collaborative student group.

On the left side, draw the layout of the page. Draw boxes for where each block of text or multimedia element will appear. 

Add a working title for the page — these can be changed later.

What will this page contribute towards the goal of the overall exhibit? In other words, what criteria will help us see that the page is succeeding? 

Make a list of all of the topics and multimedia (images, documents, graphs, maps, etc). If any maps or graphs are needed, which team member(s) will create them? Add their names next to the corresponding element.

What does the group like or dislike about this page? Keep in mind that we usually go through a handful of sketches before deciding on a final layout. Try out different ideas in quick sketches. If you are feeling stuck, try to make a sketch of the worst possible layout. (Sometimes saying what we don’t want can help us find the opposite!)

Every exhibit should start with a landing page. The overview page serves the same role as a large plaque at the start of a museum exhibit. Or we might compare the landing page to the poster for a movie. It should be super short, easy to read, and say why someone will care about the stories and materials in the exhibit. What are the key questions or themes? Please try to keep it under 50 words.

An overview can be deceptively hard to write at first, but please try to keep it to 100-150 words. Note that this text will also serve as the snippet of text used on the list of all exhibits.

At the start of each section, please include an overview that introduces the following pages. The section overview should explain why these pages are grouped together. It should also prepare someone to skim across the exhibit. A section overview is a bird’s eye view of all of the fascinating material that comes next. What questions, themes, or background info will be helpful and enticing?

The content pages are the basic unit of an exhibit. The scope of a single page can vary widely. Some pages might focus on the biography of a single person. Others might include multiple, shorter biographies to place them into dialogue with each other.

As a basic rule, it is better to have a lot of content on one page rather than a little bit of content across many pages. We know that the Internet is full of distractions — every time someone has to click to a new page is an opportunity for them to click away from our exhibits.

The goal of a content page is to provide a visitor with the primary sources and text that will empower their discovery process about the Colored Conventions. A content page does not need to be definitive, or include all details. It can be open-ended, and it can offer a variety of modes of access to these histories.

As you begin to create the outline, consider the levels of abstraction in the content of each page. We might organize an exhibit to start with a broader, conceptual overview and then dive into individual stories, primary sources, and moments in the following sections/pages. Or, alternatively, we might choose to organize a section around a single primary source, person, event, or object and then offer multiple perspectives in the following sections/pages. Either approach can work, because they both alternate between abstract and concrete content. Keep in mind that exhibits are not merely a form of delivering facts and figures. Exhibits inspire a process of discovery!