Consultancies work with LT Museum on retail products

A host of design consultancies is working with the London Transport Museum on product development projects which will exploit the city’s rich transport design heritage.

Ahead of the museum’s relaunch later this year, the venue’s retail store – designed by Lumsden Design Partnership – is to open at the end of this month, showcasing the first wave of these products. Along with LDP, groups including 1977, Easy Tiger and Conran Design Group have all drawn up ideas for products that could sell in the new museum.

The consultancies were commissioned by LT Museum head of retail Michael Walton, after the museum secured specific funding for product development as part of its overhaul budget. ‘I took about 50 key “headlines” from the museum’s history and briefed all the groups on these. Each group then had two jobs from which we picked some products to go ahead and develop,’ explains Walton.

Easy Tiger has produced a series of transport posters, some archival, some reworked and some with new designs. One of 1977’s designs is a set of greetings boards based on the dot-matrix train announcement display on the Tube, which allow users to create their own messages from the dots.

CDG has developed a range of merchandising based on the future of transport, which is to be held back for a later release, according to Walton. ‘We are trying to pitch the museum as somewhere that explains urban transport issues from around the world,’ adds Walton. To this end, LDP has developed three posters on world cities – Shanghai, Paris and New York.

Separately, Transport for London is set to relaunch its entire website at the end of the month, following a design overhaul by Detica and the organisation’s in-house team.