Skip to content
  • FR
FR
  • About us
    Building, illuminated glass towers on either side of an old, square, stone building.

    About us

    We're here to help you understand what the Bank of Canada does and how it matters to you.

    About the Bank of Canada

    Find out what the Bank does, who runs the Bank and how it is separate from the political process.

    Connect with us

    We’d love to hear from you! Contact us by email, phone or mail—or join us on social media.

  • Visit

    Visit

    • Plan your visit
    • Accessibility and special needs
    • Code of conduct
    • COVID-19 protocols

    Sensory Sundays

    We’re turning down the lights and the volume for our sensory-sensitive visitors—explore the Museum using more than eyes and ears.

    Connect with us

    We’d love to hear from you! Contact us by email, phone or mail—or join us on social media.

  • Explore

    Exhibitions

    • Permanent exhibition
    • Special exhibitions
    • Travelling exhibitions
    • Past exhibitions

    Blog

    Collection

    • About the Collection
    • Collection Services
    • Canadian Bank Notes Series
    • Search the Collection

    New acquisitions—2024 edition

    Bank of Canada Museum’s acquisitions in 2024 highlight the relationships that shape the National Currency Collection.

  • Learn

    Learn

    • Activities and games
    • Education blog
    • External resources
    • Lesson plans
    • School programs
    • Video discussion guides
    • Upcoming webinars

    Entrepreneurship: Kids edition

    Learn from the experiences of successful young entrepreneurs, then create your own business model and pitch your business.

    You are the economy

    A set of six lessons to explore economics with your students.

  • Home
  • The Museum Blog

The Adventure of Exhibit Planning V

By: Graham Iddon


September 29, 2014
Share this page on Facebook
Share this page on Facebook
Share this page on X
Share this page on X
Share this page on LinkedIn
Share this page on LinkedIn
Share this page on Google Classroom Created with Sketch.
Share this page on Google Classroom
Share this page by email
Share this page by email

Writing: in so many words

Imagine you are a hard-working exhibition designer who has sweated and struggled to meet all the demands of the exhibit planner and curators, carefully arranging images, typography and artifacts to produce an elegant display panel only to have the writer drop an extra 30 words on you the night before the panel goes to production. That sort of thing tends to make designers homicidal. Likewise, when the writing has been edited by everybody from the Director to the guy who maintains the photocopier and is finally ‘writ in stone’, the last thing the copywriter wants to hear is the designer telling him to cut out a further 30 words. That also tends to promote homicidal tendencies in otherwise gentle people. In order to prevent the creative team from ending up in hospital and/or jail, the amount of written content is decided upon before the formal designing begins. So, right from the start of the writing process, the writer is allotted only so many words for each subject zone and the designer can be guaranteed that a block of text will remain the same size. Nobody has to go to jail.

Now the writer takes a deep breath and attempts to take a subject like the ‘representation of 75 years of national identity as depicted on stamps and bank notes’ from 50 pages of research and squash it into 65 words - sort of like trying to tweet a novel. It’s amazing how long it takes to write 65 words: he throws it out, starts over, revises some more, decides he hates it, throws out all the adverbs as well as half the adjectives, puts a third back in, decides to quit and join the military, misplaces his last version, cries a little and then shuffles groggily into work Monday morning, changes a comma to a semi-colon and declares it finished. Now the frustrating part can begin. The ‘finished’ copy bounces like a badminton birdie from writer to project manager, to writer, to exhibit planner, to writer, to curator, to writer, back to curator, to writer, to director, to copy editor, to writer and then to translator and another translator and finally to the designer to plug it into the panel design. If at this point the copy resembles the first ‘finished’ draft in any way, it is purely coincidental and likely it’s just the typeface.

The majority of these panel blurbs are 50-75 words long and that ain’t much. That’s like the back of your average breakfast cereal box. Most museum panels are designed to demand about the same amount of attention as a cereal box, while communicating a whole lot more than stuff about riboflavin. It’s a serious challenge that has spawned scads of books, seminars and keynote addresses over the years. It’s a subject area crammed with statistics gathered by cheerful summer students and exhaustive research by earnest museum professionals who have come to the conclusion that nobody reads anything in a museum, ever! OK, fine, that’s an exaggeration. But long after we are all driving hover cars and wearing silver suits, the alchemists of museum communications will still be hard at it trying to discover the golden formula of brevity, simplicity, education and entertainment necessary for a successful bit of panel writing. It may actually be rocket science. Where’s my silver suit?

As for Voices from the Engraver, the writing has been ‘finalized’ and translated. The designer has not attempted to harm the writer in any way and they are still friends. Now we can chat about the design process and give you a sneak peek at how the exhibit panels will look.

Next time.

We want to hear from you! Do you have an idea for a blog post you’d like to see?
Content type(s): Blog posts

Subscribe to The Museum Blog
The Museum Blog

February 26, 2025

New acquisitions—2024 edition

By: David Bergeron, Krista Broeckx


Bank of Canada Museum’s acquisitions in 2024 highlight the relationships that shape the National Currency Collection.
Content type(s): Blog posts
February 11, 2025

Money’s metaphors

By: Phillipe Audet-Cayer, Graham Iddon, Patricia Marando


Buck, broke, greenback, loonie, toonie, dough, flush, gravy train, born with a silver spoon in your mouth… No matter how common the expression for money, many of us haven’t the faintest idea where these terms come from.
Content type(s): Blog posts
August 6, 2024

Treaties, money and art

By: Krista Broeckx, Frank Shebageget


Photo, collage, a photograph and a drawing of an elderly White man in a high collar and old-fashioned suit.
The Bank of Canada Museum’s collection has a new addition: an artwork called Free Ride by Frank Shebageget. But why would a museum about the economy buy art?
Content type(s): Blog posts Subject(s): Arts, History

More Info

30 Bank Street
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0G9, CANADA
613‑782‑8914

  • Things to do

  • Plan your visit
  • Find educational resources
  • Search the Collection
  • Connect with us
  • Things to see

  • Canadian bank notes
  • Exhibitions
  • Blog
  • Videos
  • Things to know

  • Accessibility and special needs
  • Careers
  • Code of conduct
  • COVID-19 protocols
  • Privacy
  • Social media
●●
Bank of Canada Museum

Visit the Bank of Canada web site ›

We use cookies to help us keep improving this website.

Accept and continue