Museums display

But this was where Claire Venables, working as a freelance designer for the museum, found herself — near where a small herd of stuffed giraffes were once stored. Years after the stuffed animals had been moved elsewhere in the museum, staff were still calling it ‘Giraffe Corner’.

In 2006, when naming her new business, Claire remembered this, and Giraffe Corner was born.

Claire designs permanent displays and special exhibitions for museums, stately homes and other cultural venues, and offers other creative services to the culture and heritage industry. The Historic Royal Palaces, the British Museum and the Wellcome Trust have all been clients.

She also designed China AD 800, India AD 600, and the Conservation Galleries for the refurbished Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as exhibitions currently on showing at the city’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire.

Claire studied graphic design and visual communication, then archaeology and anthropology, and finally an MA in Interpretation and Heritage Management at University College London. Her passion has always been for presenting archaeology, anthropology and natural history to the public.

Her expertise is in demand partly because the way that museums display collections has undergone a radical change in recent decades.

Claire explained: “In traditional museums the object told the story and the individual was very passive. People once walked into museums almost like they would into a cathedral.

“But modern museums have a layer of interpretation between the viewer and the object, and they are much more interactive. We create spaces that tell stories about people, places and objects through the museum’s collections.”

An exhibition may look simple and streamlined, but this belies an immensely complex collaborative effort, involving scientists and curators, conservators, designers, copywriters, and exhibition-installers.

There is a science, for example, in how visitors navigate their way around an exhibition space, and how the design can influence their speed and direction to make sure they see everything whilst not encountering bottlenecks.

Practical issues such as light and air quality have to be taken into account when displaying fragile objects and some collections require special ingenuity — such as her marine invertebrates display at London’s Natural History Museum.

Claire said: “This was quite challenging — when you take jellyfish out of the sea, you take away a lot of their natural beauty.”

Her work may involve designing a collection of posters, panels and labels, or developing an entirely new brand for a museum, with a style guide of colours, fonts and so on.

Her designs often include interactive activities, such as digital replicas of books or giant board games, such as the insect jigsaws she made for the museum at Tring. These teach children about insect anatomy in a fun and memorable way.

“It is important to remember that visitors use all their senses in experiencing and remembering a museum,” Claire said.

She has also worked in other countries, including six years in the Sultanate of Oman in the 1990s.

Here, the limited infrastructure meant she found herself also working as an illustrator, photographer and computer repairer as she passed her design skills on to nine local staff.

In her free time she explored Oman’s remote and beautiful desert landscapes, the wadis and oasis villages that she had read about in Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands.

Indeed, she followed the route of his famous journey by camel across the inhospitable Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter). As a result she was delighted to be asked to design the Wilfred Thesiger in Africa exhibition that is on at the Pitt Rivers until June 5, 2011.

Another overseas project involved designing a museum at the archaeological site of Merv on the Silk Road in Turkmenistan.

The main challenge was how to make it sustainable in a region with unreliable electricity and no exhibition-making facilities. She provided a laptop and small printer to enable local staff to update the displays as discoveries were made.

In Oman, Claire’s work was in English and Arabic, and she prides her company’s ability to work with cultural sensitivity and in multilingual environments.

In Arab countries, for example, it may be taboo to display certain objects, or display them in certain situations. The fact that Arabic books, in contrast to English ones, are read from right to left, also presents some design challenges.

“The bits of my job I enjoy the most are working with interesting people and being surrounded by beautiful objects,” she said.

“With every exhibition I get to learn so much about the museum’s collections, and it is always something new and exciting.”