Our team at Formations Inc. worked for the National Park Service to design and fabricate the new exhibits for the visitor center at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
The project offered the amazing opportunity to retell one of the greatest stories of innovation in American history. Along with this opportunity came the welcome challenges of working with the National Park Service to ensure that the exhibit area was fully ADA compliant. We used typographic best practices, tactile/braille panels and wheelchair-friendly fabrication to make the exhibits accessible and fun for everyone.
Working with the exhibit designer and another graphic designer, we developed a distinct design treatment to represent Kitty Hawk, NC and Dayton, OH. These textures and colors serve as quick visual cues to help the viewer follow the brothers’ story as it bounces back and forth between the two locations.
Being an integral part of such a unique, inspiring and historically significant project has been one of the highlights of my graphic design career so far.
To learn more, check out Formations Inc.
I colorized this iconic photo of the brothers that we turned into life-sized cutouts welcoming visitors into the exhibit area.
Vertical panels with bold headlines serve as introduction panels for each exhibit area.
This interactive activity teaches visitors about ‘wing warping’ and serves as a centerpiece of this part of the visitor center.
The back wall features a timeline, an interactive detailing some of the challenges the brothers faced and photos of the Wrights’ in action.
An example of the “Dayton” style gives the viewers a glimpse into the Wright Brothers’ Ohio workshop with panels interpreting historic artifacts.
Large cutouts of historic photos are featured showing the Wrights as they start to find success.
An iconic first flight photo is the focus of this area where the Kitty Hawk style is applied.
This series of concave panels takes the visitors through the various iterations of the Wrights’ inventions; complete with dynamic use of historic photos, tactile/braille diagrams and rotating scale-models.
Reader rails around the glider model provide details about the design of the Wright glider and use Braille panels to allow vision-impaired visitors to understand and experience the exhibit.