may 4 visitors center

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio State National Guard opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others. This tragic event continues to echo deep into the hearts of Ohioans and Americans alike fifty years later. 

The lives lost and permanently impacted that day have been memorialized in the form of the May 4 Visitors Center, a public museum and gallery seated in the building at the site of the shooting. The university’s visual communication design program shares this building. 

Glyphix Studio was tasked with the honor of developing a number of museum exhibitions for the Visitors Center over the last two years. My student designers and I thoughtfully navigated the complexities of handling historical artifacts, precious family records, and social, political, and ideological content from all engaged. 

We honored the four slain students with exhibitions celebrating their respective lives. This page details the Jeff Miller exhibit, which was the final of the series.

Jeff Miller:
Our Brother Jeff

My small team of design students and I began developing the exhibition of Jeff’s content in the summer of 2019. We first had to understand the museum space in the May 4 Visitors Center and how it is used – the flow of traffic, the typical visit duration, and the general usage of the space. These exhibitions were designed to be portable and scaleable, as they would eventually travel to other locations. Then we needed to get to know Jeff.

Jeff Miller’s exhibition is particularly dear to me, as we designed it in the summer with a much smaller team than the other three exhibits in this series, and thus, it was necessary for me to work more intimately on the project. Much of the material for this exhibition was provided by Jeff’s older brother Russ, who graciously worked with the Visitors Center to help us tell this story best.

Jeff’s story began like many of ours. He came from a kindhearted family, he had an older brother whom he looked up to, and he had a wide-eyed approach to life. He began to question the world around him as he experienced more and more. By the time he transferred to Kent State in 1970, Jeff was a young man poised to change the world.