Every Picture Tells a Story: Design and Layout of the Wristwatch Exhibit

“If one flower can say 1,000 words, think what a bunch would say,” so the quote says.

In my case, a permanent wristwatch display showing the history of the wristwatch, and it is going to take a lot more than a just timepieces or words. Too many words and people get tired, too few and no message is conveyed. The same holds true with timepieces, too many and people just cannot take it all in.

How to get around this is a mixture of words and powerful graphics. My goal is to make a display utilizing bold graphics where the “picture’ helps tell the story. Easy? Actually no. Luckily I have a lot of experience and talent around me, and with their help, I am sure we will achieve our goal.

Therefore since last update, I am concentrating on the ‘date line’ bullet descriptors, the individual watch descriptions, and, of course the graphics.

Below are some photographs of the first three displays that cover:

1) 1900 – 1919
2) Hermetic/Purse watches
3) 1920s to  1940s

The date line summaries are my first draft, both Noel Poirier, myself and others are constantly going back to them to see not if, but how they can be improved. The graphics you see on the wall are purely the pictures I am intending to scan in and turn into powerful visuals.

Adam R Harris
National Watch & Clock Museum Gallet Guest Curator of Wristwatches

A view of the graphical layout of the exhibit:

Display Case #1 with first draft labels:

Some preliminary graphic ideas above Display Case #1:

Display Case # 2 containing Hermetic (purse) watches:

Display Case #3 covering the years 1920 to 1940:

Finally the draft graphics above Hermetic and Display Case # 3:

Step-by-Step: The Wristwatch Exhibit Takes Shape

Step-by-step we move the exhibition forward. That said, not every step is forward. For me it’s a learning process and sometimes my pre-thought ideas just are not working out as I had anticipated, so again and again I revisit the display.

Tuesday, previous to last, I started to move timepieces to the gallery location. I carefully laid each timepiece out, many with original adverts or related ephemera. That took some two days just to position the pieces.

Although in my opinion it looked “good”, I felt something was not correct. Too cramped possibly? I could not see a good solution, so I kept re-visiting the layout, fine tuning it, but could still not see a solution. Museum Director Noel Poirier and I had a meeting at the display to review how it looked. After some fifteen to twenty minutes, I could understand where I was going wrong. That day, based on Noel’s (and others’ input) I reworked the display cases. Although these may not be the final pieces or even the final layout, I am much happier and feel “It may not be the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.”

Adam R Harris
National Watch & Clock Museum Gallet Guest Curator of Wristwatches

Here are some images of the progress thus far:

The first display case starts at c. 1900 (wristlet/first ladies wristwatches) to WWI.

Next we have a small case for hermetic or so called “purse” watches.

We come to “The Roaring 20s” and 1930s ‘Formed Watches/Transitional Period’– My first ideas on graphical illustration can be seen her.  These are VERY draft, and will be high definition “collage” style graphic ABOVE the date line.

Next Cabinet – very important – “Birth of Automatic” – you can see here my graphic ideas in the raw, VERY raw!

Here I am ‘trying to show difference between “bumper” and “rotor” automatic movements.

Next case is 1940s & 1950s – Complications Arrive and “The Quartz Revolution”

Displaying the “electric” watch that evolved prior to quartz (late 1950s versus quartz 1980s). Will use graphics to explain difference between quartz and electric.

This may prove the hardest.  I want to show the evolution of the wristwatch movement from mechanical to bumper, to rotor, to electric, to quartz, to kinetic. Difficult this one.

Final display case is for modern pieces – size is everything – Hoping to emphasize Moon watch as well.

Googling the Museum via the Google Art Project

“Can you imagine using Google Street View to walk through the museum?” That question from Noel Poirier began my involvement in the Google Cultural Institute project at the National Watch and Clock Museum. Noel, the museum’s director, explained that Google will create a virtual walk-through of the museum using the same technology as Street View. The first requirement, however, was the creation of an online gallery of objects from the museum’s collection. Being both excited by the audience and exposure that Google brings, and proud of the museum for being chosen to participate, I volunteered to work on this project.

The Google Art Project brings together hundreds of collections.

The work involved selecting objects for the online gallery and then entering information about them on the Google site. The basic information about each object was found using the museum’s online catalog Search.  This was simply a cut and paste job for such items as the date of the object, where it was made, its maker, and so on. Describing the object was the most difficult and time consuming. Starting with the museum catalog description, I wanted to make mine shorter and to eliminate most technical information such as number of jewels, type of escapement, etc.  A link from the Google site allows the visitor to access the museum catalog entry if they want more information. And that’s what I am hoping they will do; it just might keep them exploring our website. I had fun using the random image button on the search site and chose several objects that are not currently on exhibit in the museum.

The "back-end" of the project that allows entry of objects.

The project is very exciting and multifaceted. Already, there are new tools Google wants to try out and a need to re-photograph some of the objects.  I hope to continue working on this project; I’ll try to keep you posted on its progress.

Al Dodson

Museum Volunteer & NAWCC Workshop Instructor

Virtual Museum Interface: A New Way to Tour Online

Last week, I and two other interns had started to brainstorm a new design for the portion of the Museum’s website that gives site visitors a virtual tour of the Museum. After receiving approval from the Museum staff overseeing our project, we started to work on implementing the new design.

The idea that we came up with was to have a main page that resembled a clock. Each section of the clock would link to an information page on a specific section of the Museum. The clock image was divided into twelve sections, each representing a part of the Museum’s exhibits. Each section would contain a picture and a title.We had two ideas for the clock hands. The first was to have clock hands that would point to whatever section the user’s mouse hovered over. The second was to embed a live clock applet in the middle of the clock image. 

The new user interface for the Museum's online tour.

This week I spent most of my time creating the main clock image and working on the live clock applet code.  I created the clock image in Adobe Photoshop. I had no previous experience with the software so it was a bit of a learning process but I was eventually able to produce a decent image. I then created thirteen variations of the image, saved them as .jpg files, and sent them to one of the other interns. Each of the thirteen variations showed one of the sections of the clock highlighted (the rest faded) and the hour hand of the clock pointing to that section, except one variation that did not show any section highlighted. One of the other interns had created code that would switch between images when the user’s mouse hovered over a certain section. I also generated a piece of HTML code that embedded a live clock applet into the webpage.  The live clock applet was found online and was written in Java. The third intern working on this project developed most of the information pages on specific sections. This was done directly through the NAWCC’s Joomla website system. Next week, we will work on finalizing various portions of this project. 

Shay, St. Mary's College of Maryland

Museum Intern