UAM Summer Internship 2017: Trials and Trilobites

Since I plan to pursue a career in the museum field, exhibition work was an area I was hoping to gain experience in. I was excited to learn that I would be able to help work on the upcoming expansion of the existing University of Alberta Paleontology Museum. My introduction proved that what I thought exhibition planning involved is only a small part of the process!

The Paleontology Museum expansion will help show evolution over time using trilobites, the fossils of an extinct class of marine invertebrates called Trilobita. My project was to create a graphic that would be blown up and displayed with 3D models of trilobites to help show what was present in different time periods. I’d never given much thought to graphics such as the one I was working on and their role in preparing for an exhibition. Nor had I associated computer programs with museum exhibits, but to create the graphic I was introduced to Adobe Illustrator. Learning to use Adobe Illustrator took some trial and error as I was not working with geometric shapes and they had to be lined up with a timescale. It was often challenging to find a balance between making sure something was in the right place and the right shape. I often had to play around with different tools in illustrator to make sure each shape looked right.

Since this project would be part of an addition to the Paleontology Museum, it provided me with an opportunity to spend a bit more time in the museum itself and look more closely at parts of displays that in previous visits I had passed over. I spent more time looking closely at some of the other graphics in the museum to make sure the one I was working on would fit in and started to see how the design of such graphics can help provide information. For example in the Paleontology Museum, the colour scheme depicts whether a specimen was from a marine or terrestrial environment. I was able to see how important design elements can be for providing information as well as showcasing museum objects. 

Working on this project has given me a taste of some of the work that goes into creating a museum exhibit and proven that there’s so much more than just preparing museum objects themselves! It has also been very exciting to work on something that will actually be part of an exhibit.