Ulm: From Coffee Cups to Real Estate
INFORMATION DESIGN · EDITORIAL DESIGN · VISUAL STORYTELLING
A visual timeline designed to organise decades of people, milestones, and design outcomes without losing chronological clarity.
CONCEPT
This project translates the history of the Ulm School of Design into a visual timeline. The school’s architecture provides a continuous visual anchor, linking events, people, and design outcomes within a single chronological structure.
PROCESS
The poster developed through multiple iterations exploring colour, hierarchy, and information density. Each version helped refine the relationship between the timeline, architectural illustration, and supporting historical content.
Reviewing the composition in monochrome helped isolate structural issues before colour was introduced. This made it easier to evaluate spacing, sequence, and visual priority independently from aesthetic decisions.
Primary red, blue, and yellow were used selectively to mark key moments and create scanning points across the timeline, while black and white preserved overall clarity.
The layout evolved through several iterations that refined the information hierarchy, spacing, and relationship between the architectural illustration and historical content.
FINAL WORK
The final poster brings together the architectural timeline, key figures, institutional milestones, and Bauhaus-inspired colour system in a single visual narrative.
The final version balances historical density with visual continuity. The architectural line guides the eye from left to right, while controlled colour accents create entry points without competing with the chronological structure.
REFLECTION
Ulm: From Coffee Cups to Real Estate challenged me to organise a dense historical narrative without losing clarity or visual rhythm. The project required careful decisions around hierarchy, chronology, and composition, especially when combining people, milestones, architecture, and design outcomes within one poster. Working through the structure in monochrome before introducing colour helped me separate functional decisions from aesthetic ones. It strengthened my understanding of information design and showed me how a strong visual system can make complex content feel more accessible and connected.
