Hasta La Ideas

Last Friday night, the raw, brutalist interior of Boston’s City Hall was awash with color and festivity as Design Museum Boston kicked off the official opening of their first exhibit, “Creative Capital.”

We’ve followed Design Museum Boston’s upward journey for awhile, and their latest exhibit showcases projects by Boston designers in fashion, urban planning, graphic design, architecture, and more.

Here, Maya Luz displays her “Creature” collection made from the animal-hide-like (but sustainably manufactured composite) Valtekz, which she discovered in her father’s library of architectural materials.

I was most impressed by two aspects: the breadth and careful curation of projects, as well as DMB’s digital acumen. Each project features a prominently displayed QR code (which allows smartphone users to link to its corresponding url with a scanner app, such as Google Goggles), and they plan to launch an ipad app in the near future.

“We’re a real startup, in every send of the word,” reflected Derek Cascio, who is cofounder of Design Museum Boston alongside Sam Aquillano.

While the breadth was refreshing, the self-proclaimed non-traditional museum had some rather conventional exhibition design with large presentation boards hanging on the walls, and left visitors craving more experimentation and tactility.

This event is to be the last major public showing with DMB’s current look, and the new rebranding is a work in progress that has slowly been unveiled over the past few months on Core77. According to Samantha Allen, a graphic designer at Continuum, “Designing the logo was definitely the most fun part. But of course, that’s not all there is to it — there are color palettes, fonts, so many more aspects — and we can’t wait to share it all with everyone at the launch on January 27.” We’ll stay tuned!

More snapshots of the exhibit after the jump.

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