During my internship at the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA), I was tasked with creating a display to celebrate the history of aviation in the Buffalo-Niagara region, with displays for both the central office in Downtown Buffalo, as well as for the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport.

My original plan was to do a 2D graphic in Adobe Illustrator, as I do for most of my projects, however I didn’t feel like that would fit very well with what was being requested. Upon talking to some of the higher ups in the Public Affairs office, I learned that it would be possible to access the photo archives of the authority, and decided to use these to assemble an image-based timeline.

The photos were hand selected by myself, scanned in at high resolution, and cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop. However, due to the age of some of these photos, even the high- resolution scans had some imperfections. I decided to embrace these and artificially age the photos, adding the appearance of water damage to create a uniform appearance, as well as tinting them to a variation of the blue used for the BNIA logo, to create cohesiveness with the overall brand and location.