Flock of Books Timeline Book

A welcome center historical timeline, in the form of a flock of open book pages, which was then bound back into a single book.

New York University’s Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center, located at the southeast corner of Washington Square Park, serves as the official gateway to the campus. Following a renovation of the Center, the University approached C&G Partners to design a timeline exhibit along a well-traveled corridor that would allow visitors to trace the school’s history and the evolution of its ideals. Two hundred pages of text and imagery arranged within a long, narrow space use the metaphor of a “flock of books” to tell the story of the 175-year-old institution. The welcoming design of open pages, a reference to the open-minded attitude that defines the school’s culture, carries across different page formats to unfold into a visual system for organizing different layers of information. The result was so quickly successful that the designer suggested and then created a small keepsake book, binding all the pages in the display back into one volume, which has itself become popular among NYU alumni.