Benjamin Moore
Color & Design/Archives Internship
Background
Over the summer of 2018, I interned at the paint manufacturing company Benjamin Moore as their Color & Design/Archives Intern, which worked out perfectly as a double major in Communication Design and History. After a successful summer internship, they had me back for a few weeks over my winter break in January 2019.
Specifications
My four primary duties were to aid the Color & Design team with the launch of the 2019 Color of the Year, to organize and catalogue the formerly untidy archives at their corporate headquarters, to design a visual celebration of Benjamin Moore's long and storied history that would be on display at their R&D facility following some renovations, and to design a display surrounding the history of their manufacturing facility in Newark. However, smaller projects included a competitive analysis comparing other paint companies and their offerings to Benjamin Moore's, and scanning and retouching a fair amount of old photographs found in the archives for further use.
The Newark, NJ Manufacturing Facility Display
At this location, visitors, vendors, and representatives from other companies could tour the spaces, machines, and materials that create Benjamin Moore paint. The display I designed was placed at the beginning of the tour
route so that visitors could get a sense of the history held within the plant's walls and have some relevant visual interest should they be waiting for a tour to leave.
I was tasked with using historical photographs from Benjamin Moore's archives, and my work included organizing, cataloguing, scanning, and retouching what was in their archives at their corporate headquarters. I was even able to tour the building and cross reference photos from the archives to make sure they pictured the Newark facility. My contact at the manufacturing facility also wanted me to include photographs and information concerning Hurricane Sandy because the plant suffered severe damage due to the storm and it had taken them years to return to their previous functionality. It was a story of hardship and perseverance for those who worked at the Newark facility.
My responsibilities included deciding how this display would manifest, what its dimensions would be, what photographs would be used, what information would be put on the displays, the layout of the photos and information, and how it would be presented at the plant. The photos used on the first two panels were all scanned from the archives and edited, as many of them demonstrated visible signs of aging, wear, and tear. The photos on the right panel were provided by my contact at the plant. These photos in particular presented a challenge because many of them weren't high quality and so I had to work within the constraints of their resolutions.
The Flanders, NJ R&D Facility Display
The three guiding principles for this display were that it was meant for a research and development facility, that the proposed placement for the display was behind a receptionist desk, and that part of the display should include the color testing area that has been at the facility (in one form or another) for decades. On the first point, I looked for photos of machines and research equipment to convey the idea of research and development. Luckily, the archives proved fruitful and had plenty of options. On the
second point, I picked photos that, even though the panels were going to be around 4 feet across, weren't too small so as to be unreadable from a few feet away. And on the third principle, I made the majority of the fourth panel focus on the color testing areas. You can see a number of examples on the fourth panel of the different weather testing setups the facility has and does use. Unfortunately, I was never able to get a photo of the printed and displayed result.
