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Museums & heritage
The Durham Museum: letting Art Deco architecture guide the design
From the September 2026 concept archive · Story published November 9, 2026
Original concept artwork from our proposal archive. The production-and-use story below is an imagined next chapter; a completed order is not claimed for these items.
The horizontal pin borrows the rhythm of the museum wordmark and station windows, with amber points arranged like a small marquee.
The inspiration behind the design
Downloaded website logo and photograph
The Durham Museum's own wordmark and an archival Union Station exterior photograph were saved as references. The slender Art Deco lettering and station geometry shaped the coin's identity and architectural theme. The Great Hall scene is a stylized interpretation, so its relief should be read as a design study rather than a measured building drawing.
The idea behind the object
A miniature architectural product needs selective simplification: preserve the station's recognizable rhythm and let tiny secondary lines fall away.
Thought experiment: taking the proposal further
A production proof brings the printed artwork, cut outline, LED locations, battery, switch, and attachment together. The lights need room inside the edge, and the name needs to remain readable at the selected size. A rendering can show the intended mood; a sample establishes the actual brightness, sequence, weight, and fit.
In that imagined next chapter, the approved proof would lead to a sample review, then a confirmed production run and a plan for presenting the pieces. Those are possible next steps, not events we claim happened for this proposal.
Explore the related coin and keepsake design story.