Portland Japanese Garden: Growing with Community

Client Portland Japanese Garden
Role Designer, Illustrator
Tools Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign
Credits Regan Nishikawa (exhibit photos)
Vendors Brown Printing

Portland Japanese Garden offers a place for visitors from around the world to immerse themselves in Japanese arts and culture. One way to do this is through the celebration of traditional cultural festivals, which the Garden has been doing for decades.

The Growing with Community exhibit was created to showcase Portland Japanese Garden’s role as a hub for cultural celebration within the community. Photographs of the Garden’s festivals throughout the years were placed alongside traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints to show the long history of these celebrations. Inspired by the ukiyo-e style, I created illustrations of key elements for each festival to help draw the viewer’s eye and left the text treatment simple so that the imagery was the main focus. Negative space was left along the bottom of the wall panels to allow for three dimensional exhibit objects, representing each festival, to be placed in front without obstructing the design.