Project: Olafur Eliasson --
The Weather Project

Client: Tate Modern

Date: October 2003

Designers: James Goggin,
Laurenz Brunner

Practise designed all posters, print media (from invites to Tate Shop shopping bags) and exhibition graphic design for Olafur Eliasson's ‘The Weather Project’.

The pseudo-factual results of a ‘Weather Monitoring Group Survey’ given by Eliasson to Tate employees yielded perfect one-line statistics and rhetorical questions for media-specific use across the different publicity outlets: ‘8 out of 10 postcards mention the weather’, for example. The design was kept as simple as possible -- no need for superfluous decoration with such an epically beautiful project -- but deceptively so. While ostensibly a plain composition of black typography on yellow, the design can also be retrospectively viewed as an explicit diagram of Eliasson’s piece: a customised version of the Tate font made of ‘precipitation’ dots over a blank space bathed in yellow reduce the work to its fundamental components of mist and light.