Meow Wolf

Meow Wolf is an experiential arts company based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico that has several permanent exhibits across the US. I joined the Meow Wolf Visual Development (or VisDev) team right around the time that the team was beginning to develop work for the company’s fifth exhibition: Radio Tave, located in Houston, Texas. As an Exhibition Graphic Designer my work was focused on creating design that would live “in-show” at Radio Tave. My projects varied wildly in scale, style, material, context, purpose, and more. Meow Wolf’s exhibitions are often about balancing otherworldly, surreal, or just plain weird visuals and ideas with familiar, ordinary, or even sometimes boring elements of real life. This meant creating a lot of designs that rode the line between being approachable and familiar, but also a little bit strange. Some projects had to mimic “undesigned design,” such as a sign-in sheet for the radio station that someone could have made in Microsoft Word. Other projects were about going as creative and wild as possible, such as banners and signs for alien products in the alley full of businesses. Usually if there was an opportunity to make something a little weird or “meow-wolfey” the designers were encouraged to explore that opportunity.

I created logos from across the ages for fictional events and businesses, I designed signage in alien languages, developed handwriting to be used for various characters in the show, and much, much more. I was able to work on so many new skills such as character design, mural design, and powered sign development. One highlight was working on the development of the branding for Radio Tave. I was lucky enough to be part of a small team that developed the logo, iconography, and color scheme for the exhibition. I also got to work on projects for internal use within Meow Wolf, marketing and operations projects, and merch design for Radio Tave.

Some projects at Meow Wolf moved very quickly and were about creating as much creative material as possible in a given amount of time. These “sprint” projects included tasks such as making mass amounts of fake band stickers, flyers, and gig posters for the radio station in the exhibition to give the space a lived-in feeling. Other projects, such as the Radio Tave branding or powered sign design for the alley way space, were slow moving, deliberate, and iterative. Some projects had strict specifications, some had none at all. Despite the variety of projects the main themes throughout the exhibition work was designing with the visitors in mind, carefully designing within specific context, and designing outside of the box.