Lewis Latimer House Museum
Visual Identity, Exhibition, Architecture
Consulting, architecture, and graphic design for a new permanent exhibition at the home of a 19th Century Black inventor
Creativity, precision, and sheer brilliance
We collaborated closely with the Lewis Latimer House Museum — as well as Latimer's descendants, local community members, advocates, and artists — to help realize a decades-long goal of creating a sophisticated new permanent exhibition at his home in Queens, NY. The son of escaped slaves, Latimer was a self-taught inventor, draftsman, artist, and poet. His seminal invention made the production of the carbon filament — the key component of the electric light bulb — more efficient, making electric light broadly accessible to the public. The brilliance of his mind is evidenced in his patents and blueprint drawings, which are on display, as well as his trailblazing career. He served in key roles on the teams of Hiram Maxim and Thomas Edison as a draftsman and a creator of patents. The exhibition also tells the story of how he made a home in Flushing, Queens, a flourishing Black community, and how that home became the engine for his advocacy and personal artistic practice.
A distinctive graphic and architectural vocabulary
Our team studied primary source material such as Latimer's blueprint drawings, his extensive handwritten narratives in his journals, and his artwork to develop a distinctive visual identity and a custom typeface called Filament. We also designed an architectural framework that feels futuristic while evoking the material aesthetic of his time — a time when the mechanisms of the industrial era were giving way to the beginnings of the electric world. Both the graphic design and the architecture had to be carefully calibrated to complement a compact space, providing opportunities for close observation and narrative while creating space for large student groups to gather and for accessible flow through the house.
A place of invention and imagination
The exhibition work builds on a comprehensive strategic plan created by Brocade Studio and writing by Josh Epperson, who identified the goal of making the house a space of inspiration and learning, especially for young people. We collaborated with KASA Collective to create four interactive stations within the exhibit: an invention machine that brings to life, through hi-resolution three-dimensional modeling, Latimer's unrealized patents; a poetry machine, which toggles through and reads out his poems; a heroes wall with profiles of change-makers across time; and a children's magazine, whose cover can be customized with kids' own selfies, with filters reflecting their image as inventors and artists.
