A GREAT AND DIRTY CITY: DICKENS AND THE LONDON FOG
Client: Charles Dickens Museum
May 2023
Graphic Design: studio HB
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studio HB has a long standing creative relationship with the Charles Dickens Museum in central London and we have worked with them yearly since 2016 designing visual identities and exhibition graphics all about the multi faceted Charles Dickens. We are proud to have created over ten exhibitions ranging from titles such as Man of Science, Food, Glorious Food, Ghosts and now Fog.
We were asked to design the environmental graphics and an identity for the exhibtion Fog. Starting with the colour palette we drew on the London ivy or pea-soupers as they were known which were heavy dense fogs, of greens, yellows, rust colours and black. We wanted to use a characterful font that bought personality to the fog, Dickens thought these fogs were part inspiration and part menace and full of spirit.
This exhibition explored the circumstances that created these polluted fogs as well as London experience of pollution today. A key part of the brief was to use greener materials. With many of our exhibitions we used GF Smith Colorplan for panels and labels with which as well as being fully recyclable and biodegradable, Colorplan has FSC certification, meaning that the pulps used are all from managed forests. It is also Heavy Metal Free and, because the bleaching process avoids the use of harmful chlorine, it is classified ECF. The vinyls we specified had to have PVC free surfaces.









