The University of Virginia is laid out in a particularly beautiful quadrangle on a hillside here in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s design is so innovative and so perfect that it is listed on the World Heritage List as one of the sites that should be preserved at all costs. When the university decided to produce a brochure for the thousands of tourists that arrive each week, they hired us to design it.

Jim vividly remembers the meeting where this project was initially discussed:

“We met in the Rotunda, the large Pantheon-replica that Jefferson put at one end of his Academical Village, and the folks from the university started laying out what they wanted this brochure to accomplish. Suddenly the design of this thing rushed into my head full-formed. I don’t usually share ideas with the client at such an early stage, but this one just wouldn’t stay silent. I started to describe it and everyone at the table could instantly see what I had in mind. We all got pretty excited about it.”

What Jim described that day was exactly what we produced. And it’s a pretty unusual format. We commissioned Gail Macintosh to produce a 9-foot-long watercolor that displays the faces of all the buildings from one end of the quadrangle around to the Rotunda and then down the other side. The piece uses a rolling fold that reveals this painting one panel at a time. Each opening reveals another subject panel which then disappears as the next one is opened. This has the effect of introducing the detailed information a bit at a time. When the whole piece is unfolded the viewer sees the entire “village” in one long run, and you can even set the brochure up in a “U” shape on a desktop and recreate the orientation of all the buildings one to another.