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A 60-Foot Timeline for the U of U Theatre

A history wall and two feature walls for the University of Utah’s Theatre Department, designed with GSBS Architects.

A long hallway with a printed timeline along one wall: a large sepia portrait of Maud May Babcock, then teal and gray panels of photos and text running toward the far end.

Most of my work lives on screens. This one lives in a hallway, and it’s 60 feet long.

Working freelance with the experiential design team at GSBS Architects, I designed a graphic timeline and two feature walls for the University of Utah’s Theatre Department. The goal was to celebrate decades of the program’s history and give students, faculty and visitors a shared sense of identity and pride, across every department that walks that corridor.

The approach

A hallway is a tough place to tell a story. Nobody stops to read a wall of text on their way to rehearsal. So we went bold and minimal, and let emotion and clarity do the work. The design system came down to four ideas:

  • Big historical photography to stop people in their tracks.
  • A clean, modern type structure to carry the story and the chronology.
  • A modular layout that guides you along the timeline without thinking about it.
  • Two extra graphic walls to widen the story and anchor the space.

The history wall

A design elevation of the Theatre West Corridor history wall: a long strip of teal and gray panels with dates from 1853 to 2024, plus a close-up of the 1895, ~1930 and 1938 panels with archival photos.

The timeline runs as one continuous band of teal and gray panels, each pairing a date and a short story with an archival photo. Big dates are easy to spot from down the hall. The details are there for anyone who slows down.

The installed timeline up close: a teal Young People’s Theatre panel with black-and-white photos of a man building a set model and a young actor beside a costumed figure.
The far end of the timeline: panels for Kenneth Washington, the Price Theatre Arts Building and the Meldrum Theatre, ending in a large color photo of the new theatre’s seats and stage.

Thin red lines connect each story to its photo and pull your eye down the wall. The photography starts in sepia and black and white and slowly shifts to color as the timeline reaches the present day, ending at the Meldrum Theatre. You can watch the program grow up as you walk.

The feature walls

A design elevation of the Theatre North graphic walls: two floor-to-ceiling vinyl murals of overlapping red, orange, teal and gray triangles on either side of a wood-paneled wall and two sets of doors.

The two feature walls take the opposite approach: no dates, no names, just color. They’re floor-to-ceiling vinyl murals of overlapping triangles in red, orange, teal and gray, framing the doors on either side of the space. They bring a burst of energy to the end of the corridor, and you can catch a peek of one at the end of the hallway in the photos above.

Thinking at 60 feet

Environmental work makes you think at a different scale. A design that looks great on a 27-inch monitor has to hold up at 60 feet, under fluorescent lights, next to a fire extinguisher cabinet. (There’s one right in the cover photo.)

My favorite part is that it isn’t just decoration. It’s a program’s memory, printed on a wall, for the next generation of theatre students to walk past every day.