College Basketball Experience and Hall of Fame, Kansas City
The College Basketball Experience and Hall of Fame is a major attraction within the revived central core of Kansas City, adjoining with the T-Mobile Center, and its mission is to provide an immersive and exciting way to live the sport of college basketball. Comprising two floors and 41,500 square feet, the facility offers high-energy interactive exhibits, skills development, and a center court used for expositions and youth training.
Working with Boston Productions and ESI Design to execute their top-level art direction, my studio was engaged to develop the complete environmental graphics package for the Experience, from the oversize exterior supergraphics to interpretive and wayfinding elements inside. The scope required precise coordination of 2D graphics to complex 3D forms, researching interpolation systems to bring historic grainy photos to vivid life at high resolution, and innovation in creating elaborate infographics conveying the history of the sport.
PROJECT CREDITS
Boston Productions • Project Director, Audiovisual DesignerChristopher Raia, SEGD • Graphics Project Manager
Clinton Goyette & Heather Shaw • Graphic Designers
Bob Noll • Creative Director
ESI Design / NBBJ • Exhibit Designer, Project Director
The American Heritage Museum, Stow, Massachusetts
The Collings Foundation, an educational nonprofit known for their exhibition of historic aircraft and automobiles, was chosen as recipient of a large collection of military artifacts from the holdings of Jacques Littlefield. The American Heritage Museum thus became home to this significant bequest, housed in a 65,000 square foot visitor center in Stow, Massachusetts.
We developed the complete graphics and identity for the Museum, providing the guiding design direction as well as individual designs for each environmental and interpretive graphic. Anchoring each exhibit are immense, supergraphic backdrops—a blend of historical photos, graphic overlays, atmospheric quotations, and a complex color palette that give unique character to each exhibit pod.
Within, freestanding map panels offer battle placement and scholarly text underscoring the human connection to the technology on display. Narrative wall panels and reader rails offer artifact insight and foster connections on a personal level. The concluding exhibit, Memorial Walkway, serves as a poignant collage of loss, anguish, and triumph spanning America’s history of military involvement.
PROJECT CREDITS
MGA Partners • Project CoordinationChristopher Raia, SEGD • Lead Designer, Project Manager
Dani Guralnick & Kelly Carter • Graphic Designers
Boston Productions • Project Director, Audiovisual Designer
Bob Noll • Creative Director
Jakub Janiga • Exhibit Designer
Photography • Halkin Mason Photography
Wharton Academic Research Building, University of Pennsylvania
The Wharton School is nestled into the dense urban context of this storied ivy league campus in West Philadelphia. The new five-story academic building, designed by MGA Partners, is a key new presence across from the historic Quad, and forms a new gateway to the main Penn campus.
In order to unite the wedge-shaped building on the interior, and increase its prominence from the adjacent campus pathways, the lead design architect envisioned a vibrant Identity Mural wrapping the academic core of the building. Its design is comprised of graphic glass panels viewable from within and afar. Three layered elements of color—a background field, tonal bands in the core, and chromatic strands on the surface—transition across the building in a gradient.
This mural, spread across the building over three stories, provides intimate detail, defines common spaces, and emphasizes transparency of the building’s facade. Stemming from this lead, we developed an extensive palette of donor recognition treatments and building signage to form a cohesive identity for the building and to extend the Wharton brand.
PROJECT CREDITS
MGA Partners • ArchitectDan Kelley, FAIA • Lead Design Architect
Catherine Broh, AIA • Project Director
Christopher Raia, SEGD • Lead Graphic Designer
Kai Johnson & Yaofang Hu • Production Staff
Photography • Halkin Mason Photography
The Mann Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia
A new home for the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts, was created in 1976 as a response to the need for better weather protection from its previous location at the Robin Hood Dell in East Fairmount Park. Today, it offers musical theater, opera, and dance as well as popular and classical music—making it Philadelphia’s premier summer venue, and placing it among the most well known in the country.
MGA Partners has been engaged for two decades for masterplanning and design, and the environmental graphics here are the result of several initiatives. A new Pavilion sponsor, TD Bank, required our design for major recognition elements, while the Acclaim and Crescendo event tents demanded a discrete identity. A capital campaign we supported with graphics and collateral also resulted in the need for smaller donor recognition elements such as pavers and garden signs across the campus.
Finally, we comprehensively updated site-wide graphics to reflect the new initiatives—including the restoration and deployment of vintage midcentury MCPA lettering that had been recently discovered in storage.
PROJECT CREDITS
MGA Partners • ArchitectCatherine Broh, AIA • Design Architect, Project Director
Christopher Raia, SEGD • Graphic Designer
Photography • Halkin Mason Photography
Byrne United States Courthouse, Philadelphia
The James A. Byrne United States Courthouse is a Federal courthouse in Center City Philadelphia, next to Independence Mall, and is home to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. MGA Partners renovated both the main building lobby and the Third Circuit library, and in each location we designed and installed permanent exhibits.
In the former, our Judicial Independence exhibit highlights the importance of this facet of the Branch to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” It was commissioned by the General Services Administration to coincide with the annual Judicial Conference held at the Byrne Courthouse in 2020.
After the renovation of the Third Circuit’s main library in 2018, we were retained to create an exhibit in honor of Judge William H. Hastie, to whom the facility is dedicated. The first Black Governor of the US Virgin Islands, he was appointed to the Third Circuit in 1949 where he served for the remainder of his life.
PROJECT CREDITS
MGA Partners • ArchitectChristopher Raia, SEGD • Exhibit Designer
Photography • Halkin Mason Photography
Early Childhood Program, Germantown Friends School
Founded in 1845 as an independent Quaker school, Germantown Friends School has long been a progressive educational institution that views the K-12 years as only the first chapter of many in a lifetime of learning. Their thriving campus in the Germantown section of Philadelphia serves students from all over the city and nearby suburbs, but with a significant portion of their population coming from Center City, chose to establish an Early Childhood location in the heart of the city.
The new space, located in the historic Curtis Building in Washington Square, offers four classrooms, maker and movement studios, and lab facilities—all totaling over 10,000 square feet. To bring the tactile and evocative qualities of GFS to this new location, we designed a series of photomurals that convey the character of the main campus, and applied bold and engaging wayfinding graphics to the spaces to carry forth the brand and mission of the school.
PROJECT CREDITS
MGA Partners • ArchitectCatherine Broh, AIA • Project Director
Christopher Raia, SEGD • Lead Graphic Designer
Photography • Halkin Mason Photography
INFOGRAPHICS, MAPS, AND SCHEMATICS
Expressing complex ideas with multivariate data in an intuitive, elegant way is an area of visual design I particularly enjoy. Here are illustrations I've made for the National Museum of the American Indian (prototype of their current wayfinding system), Old Sturbridge Village, Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, and Turkey Hill.
HISTORIC DEERFIELD
Working with Boston Productions, I developed the brand identity and signage system for this western Massachusetts living history museum. As a group, the team came up with the tagline of "Opening Doorways to the Past" which I depicted with a period skeleton key / house mashup. It captures the self-guided spirit of the place as you step through so many portals into the 18th century. My crew then developed the signage package for the entire village—both physical design and graphics.
Rancatore's Ice Cream
Small-batch ice cream expert Joe Rancatore retained my firm to develop the brand and graphic direction for Rancatore's Ice Cream, his grouping of four stores in the greater Boston area. We do his retail space design, packaging, apparel, and brand pieces like fleet graphics. You'd think I'd be the size of a house by now.
DAHLIA KANNER STUDIO
I manage the brand and collateral for this well-known Rhode Island jewelry designer. It involves her front page web design and social media postings, managing a large database of designs that feed them, product photography, and the design of all postcards, packaging, and other customer and retailer touchpoints.
About Me
I am a Rhode Island School of Design-educated experiential designer and creative director, and am currently an Associate and Director of Graphics at MGA Partners in Philadelphia. This is a leadership position at a great firm which involves responsibility over a wide range of initiatives—from completing complex graphic design commissions to directing our hiring and professional development, coordinating the preparation of proposals, and engaging with project teams on creative process. I have also spent 13 years as a University-level professor—most notably at Wentworth Institute of Technology, along with stops at RISD and University of Delaware.
In my early career I spent several years in Product Design, where my housewares designs netted a couple awards and a dozen patents. I'm a passionate maker, and occasionally take on design-build commissions along with the unending renovation of (and addition to) our midcentury ranch in the artist community of the Ardens, Delaware.
During any scrap of spare time that pops up, I’m a vintage car nut and amateur bicycle framebuilder.
EXHIBIT DESIGN, PARTIAL LISTING
Johnstown Heritage Discovery Center, Johnstown PA
The WaterCourse at Alabama Power Company, Clanton AL
Charles River Museum of Industry, Waltham MA
ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, Burlington VT
Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, Johnston RI
Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge MA
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield MA
Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth MA
Erie Canal Discovery Center, Lockport NY
National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC
Freedom Bound: Syracuse & The Underground Railroad, Onondaga NY
Tasty Baking Company Visitor Center, Philadelphia PA
Turkey Hill Visitor Center, Conestoga PA
The College Basketball Experience and Hall of Fame, Kansas City MO
Branding
Rancatore's Ice Cream
CreateUrPlate.com
Dahlia Kanner Studio
Maggie Bokor Jewelry
Products
Animalhouse kitchen tools
Smart Cookie kitchen tools
The Tornado wine opener (2013 housewares award)
The Greens kitchen tools (2010 housewares award)
View full CV here