Work / Exhibits
Tactile botanic illustrations
United States Botanic Garden, Washington, DC
In 2024, United States Botanic Garden commissioned 20 tactile graphic illustrations based on herbarium specimens from around the world. Each one shows a single plant seen from the side. The printed metal plates displayed in the Botanic Garden, next to the actual plants as part of a public exhibit called, Fierce Flora: Tales of Survival and Demise.
Inspired by the glass flowers collection at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, Touch Graphics and graphic designers at the Botanic Garden collaborated on these images, adding raised lines, textures, 3D contours and braille labels to photographs of each plant. These tactile features were built up in solidified white ink in multiple passes on a flatbed UV printer. In the final step, the original color photographs were printed on top of the tactile forms, so that exhibit visitors can experience the illustrations through vision, touch, or a combination of both senses.
The resulting panels are durable, easy to clean with soap and water, and are surprisingly inexpensive to produce, thanks to the advent of UV printing, originally developed for a different purpose, but ideally suited to producing perfectly registered, high resolution tactile and visual graphics on many rigid substrates.
