Cody Rocko

July 2020

As part of MOA’s Re-opening Committee, my task was to create a graphics system to help guests safely navigate the Museum during a global pandemic. Keeping in mind that this new era of social distancing has been isolating and stressful to many, we endeavoured to make the museum as welcoming as it was safe. Even still, the city was just opening up again, and we knew visitors would be apprehensive as they started to make their way in a world that had entirely new expectations of them. It was in the graphic design where I saw the opportunity to soften the edges of the hard corners of safety protocol.

MOA’s approach needed to be a little different from the other social distancing signage popping up around the city. My system had to be warm even though the messaging was serious in nature. It had to look a little more than temporary but a little less than permanent. Like any good branding system, it had to be consistent without becoming wallpaper. And above all, because we’re the Museum of Anthropology, it had to have humanity. These were not unlike the needs of many of our exhibitions.

To create the over 100 signs that are now installed throughout the Museum, administration and grounds, I brought three main elements together. First, I choose a brash pallet of seven distinct colours. Then, I created the suite of off-kilter yet joyful little figures set the tone for the rest of the design. And finally, in instances where iconography wasn’t needed, I used geometric shapes as a way of creating harmony with the rest of of the signage system. Read more about my process as you scroll through the images.

May 2019

From the Museum of Anthropology’s 2019-2020 Annual Report:

Shadows, Strings and Other Things: The Enchanting Theatre of Puppets opened in May, 2019; curated by Nicola Levell, the exhibition displayed over 250 puppets from 15 countries, including 101 purchased specifically for this show….The exhibition was designed to create a feeling of theatricality through lighting, graphic design and layout. Designed and installed by MOA Designer Skooker Broome and MOA Graphic Designer Cody Rocko, the dramatic exhibition featured five large-scale, purpose-built theatrical stages, each for a specific puppet type. The stages depicted scenes from puppetry performances, and the backs gave visitors a glimpse of backstage brought “behind-the-scenes” storage spaces and workshop settings. Audio-visual resources next to each stage offered clips from documentaries on puppetry from different places, cultures, traditions and makers.

In 2020, the exhibition received a Canadian Museums Association award for Outstanding Achievement.

November 2018

The Museum was preparing for huge seismic upgrades which meant the Great Hall, MOA's biggest attraction, would be closed for nine months. To communicate the museum’s dedication to the preservation of its collections as well as illuminate Indigenous knowledge alongside the voices of engineers, geologists and artists it was decided to transform a corridor near the crossroads of the Great Hall into a huge, multi-faceted infographic on earthquakes complete with VR, video, audio, an earthquake tracker and light boxes.

November 2018

Aboriginal women have been redrawing the boundaries of the contemporary Aboriginal art scene in Australia since the late 1980s, redefining a movement that continues today.

From the vast to the minute, the subjects of the works range from distant celestial bodies to the tiny flowers of the native bush plum. They also encompass the day-to-day acts of their lives, from venerable craft traditions to women’s ceremonies. And though the subjects are drawn from the visible and natural world, they are not bound by it. The works invoke the infinite, challenging the very constraints and constructs of time and space.

The artists bring their ancient cultural knowledge into their contemporary artistic practice, and continue to create art to ensure their languages, land and knowledge survive in an increasingly digital world. Their works are steeped in the traditions of their communities and yet speak to the universal themes of our shared existence, revealing the continued relevance of Indigenous knowledge in understanding our time and place in this world.

May 2018

“Displaying art and performance by artists in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, El Salvador, Ecuador and Chile, and paying special attention to marginalized communities, this exhibition explores the role of creativity during times of political turmoil.”
MOA press release

March 2018

“Culture at the Centre is an unprecedented exhibition that offers insight into the important work Indigenous-run cultural centres and museums in British Columbia are doing to honour and support their culture, history and language. Five centres are showcased, representing six communities.

Covering a wide geographic expanse, from what is now Vancouver to the Nass River valley, this is the first time that these communities have come together to collaborate on an exhibition and showcase their diverse cultures in one space.”

November 2017

“For generations Salish peoples have been harvesting the resources of their territories, transforming them into robes of rare beauty and power. Symbols of identity they acted as legal documents and were visible signifiers of the presence of knowledge holders and respected people.”

June 2017

“In a Different Light presents more than 110 historical Indigenous artworks and marks the return of many important works to British Columbia. These objects are amazing artistic achievements. Yet they also transcend the idea of ‘art’ or ‘artifact.’ Despite sitting still in a glass case before you, some artworks never stop moving. They contain histories. They challenge us. They are more than art.

MOA’s groundbreaking new gallery is dedicated to Indigenous art from the Northwest Coast. One of the most elegant and innovative exhibition spaces of its kind, the 210-square-metre gallery pairs cutting-edge technology with an inviting and natural setting that reflects the surrounding environment.”

May 2017

“Words and their physical manifestations are explored in this insightful exhibition, which will honour the special significance that written forms, especially calligraphy, hold across the many unique cultures of Asia – a vast geographical area boasting the greatest diversity of languages in the world.”

Traces of Words was an exciting exhibition to work on as a designer and typographer. The very concept of the exhibition explored the idea of words not as signifiers, but as images themselves. The curator, Fuyubi Nakamura, called on her audience to look at words as part of material culture, not merely text. Of course the art in the exhibition was doing the work of turning words into objects so it was the design’s job to compliment that concept, not become pieces in the exhibition as well.

Another major theme of the exhibition was the ephemerality of language; words appearing and disappearing into the ether of temporal and psychic space. I knew whatever I did, it had to be delicate and poetic in it’s form and function.

I knew I didn’t want the text to feel like it had borders or constraints, ie. printed, mounted on a surface and fixed to the wall. I wanted it to feel like at any moment, these words could disappear and flutter away. I experimented with light materials (in both senses) such as printing on vellum and making a natural light box. This direction had a few restrictions: 1. mounting it away from the wall while retaining legibility required more materials and time than we had to do it well and 2. because the art in the show was so delicate, labels in this form could easily start competing for dominance in the space which is always bad.

So to help the text receded into the space, I mounted directly on the space itself. Using light grey vinyl and a delicate serif typeface (a natural choice as serif type originated from calligraphy) the words became light, literary marks on the wall. The main text for this exhibit were six artists statements in the artists’ native languages and their English translations. So for the many people who don’t speak Japanese, Tibetan, Thai and Dari, a lot of the text in the labels became another visual encounter with words.

For the title wall, I used frit (a grey translucent vinyl) to make the title appear backwards and fading under the actual title letters. Because frit has a little sparkle in it, sometimes it catches the light and is highly visible while at other angles, it disappears completely. The title had this same quality; from some angles you could read the title perfectly and at others, it was completely illegible, obscured by the letters underneath it. This nuanced effect helped to echo the main themes of ephemerality and fragmentation.

March 2017

“Amazonia: The Rights of Nature explores the creative ideas that inspire Indigenous resistance to threats facing the world’s largest rainforest. Taken in its entirety, the exhibition promises to offer a revealing window into one of the world’s more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse regions, as well as a new framework for addressing some of the globe’s most pressing environmental challenges.”

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature was the first museum exhibition I’d ever worked on let alone be give the role of sole graphic designer. It was a huge learning curve for me and and it was exhilarating.

Luckily for me, the curator, Nuno Porto, was a patient client who always offered thoughtful insight into a complicated and difficult subject: the indigenous peoples and the threatened environments of the Amazon river basin.

From the outset, Nuno was clear that he didn’t want another exhibition highlighting the ‘exotic’ qualities of the Amazon, its lush flora and fauna and its ‘mysterious’ uncontacted peoples. Rather, this was an exhibition about the stark political realities facing vulnerable populations and their active roles in their environment.

In this way, the labels took on the role of Document. The diversity of content and the self-aware curatorial voice called for a no-nonsense design sensibility. Stark, clean and to-the-point, the labels acknowledged their role of messengers of difficult information while creating an interesting juxtaposition to compelling and beautiful objects. The exhibition on a whole flies in the face of what a typical museum-goer would expect from an exhibition about the Amazon.

The exhibition designer, David Cunningham, chose a deep, rusty orange to be the dominant colour. It is the colour of the mud along the banks of some stretches of the Amazon but also the colour of the earth in the areas of the forest that have been turned into large-scale mining operations.

The wordmark (title) for this show was something special for me. My initial inclination was to keep it simple; that was in-line with the graphic austerity of the rest of the exhibition and I knew it’d be easy to make with my then-limited knowledge of materials. But that direction wasn’t sitting well with me the more I meditated on it. The over-arching theme of the show was to demonstrate the complexity of peoples, their ideologies, histories, technologies and threats over an enormous geographical area. Simple, in this instance, didn’t make sense. I wanted sprawling, diverse, uncomfortable yet striking and bold. I wanted the river to be the connector of the unwieldy and complex world of the Amazon. So, after some convincing to get Nuno and David on board with my idea, this final version on the wordmark for Amazonia turned out to be the part of the show I was most proud of.

“All Together Now: Vancouver Collectors and Their Worlds featured 20 beautiful, rare, and unconventional collections, with something for everyone including corsets, prosthetics, pinball machines, taxidermy, toys, and much more. In this exhibition both collector and collected were objects of study, interaction, and delight.
All Together Now explored the act of collecting, the collector’s vision and the role collections play in building identity, public memory and social connections.”

For All Together Now, the education team with tasked with creating a programme that would allow primary school kids to interact with the exhibition in a meaningful way. Because the show was about collecting and one of the most popular thing to collect in the world is trading cards, it seemed a natural choice to make a trading card game.

The programmers scoured the exhibition to find 50 interesting objects and their stories and it was my job to put that into card-form.

Each card featured a picture of the object and a short list of information about that object with one list item left blank. It was the kids job to find the object in the gallery in order to fill-in that missing information. They would receive a token with that card’s value which was indicated by the meter on the bottom of the card marked green, teal and orange (orange being the most difficult and green being the easiest).

Ben and Erin are two of the most fun and creative people I've ever met and was honoured when Erin asked me to design their wedding invitation.

The couple wanted a 1970s feel to the invite and as an underlying theme for the wedding. We used a 1970s graphic inspired B interlocking with an E to create the front of the invite. Inside uses clean and minimal type to round out the throw-back over-all feel.