In August of last year, the Georgia Museum of Art began working with Pentagram to create a new brand for a new era. This process followed on the heels of celebrating the museum’s 75 years open to the public. We had spent time looking at our past. Now it was time to look to and shape our future.
Pentagram is a well-known, multidisciplinary, independently owned design studio, founded in London in 1972 but with offices all over the world. It has designed graphics and identity, strategy and positioning, products and packaging, exhibitions and installations, websites and digital experiences, advertising and communications, data visualizations and typefaces, sound and motion. The firm is unusual in that it is run by 23 partners, each of whom is a practicing designer.
Partner Eddie Opara, who will speak at the museum this fall, managed the team that worked with the museum, meeting regularly with Hillary Brown and Michael Lachowski in the museum’s department of communications as well as with director David Odo. A brand isn’t just a logo, and it’s not something that changes what an organization is. It’s an expression of an organization’s core identity and values that extends to tone of voice and messaging as well as logo, typography, color and many finer points of design.
To understand the museum, Pentagram’s team began by gathering information. They interviewed stakeholders throughout the museum and the university, including students, and visited to see how we fit into campus. They evaluated all our current materials. And then they spent some time thinking deeply. The result was a brand idea focused on learning and exploration, encouraging visitors to slow down and engage. Visitor surveys and the interviews Pentagram conducted showed certain concepts bubbling up over and over: inspiration, wellbeing, discovery, curiosity. These ideas worked well with our well-established parent brand at the University of Georgia, which focuses on sincerity and commitment. The result was a brandline called “_____ More Art.”
A brandline is a phrase or sentence like “Just Do It” for Nike or “You’re in good hands” for Allstate. Another recurring idea in surveys was the fact that the Georgia Museum had so much more to offer than visitors thought before they came here for the first time. University museums vary a lot in size, and we had “more art” than they anticipated. Pentagram’s idea was to take that phrase and add different verbs in front of it, depending on the concept: “Enjoy More Art,” “See More Art,” “Support More Art,” “Shop More Art” and so on. Sincere, committed and yet sparking curiosity, it felt just right, and you’ll be seeing it many places as we roll out new materials.
Although the logo isn’t the cornerstone of branding, it may be the most visible part of the process, and Pentagram’s designers dug into the research their team had done to create a new one for us. Opara is a very type-focused designer, and the team ended up creating a custom typeface just for the museum that also makes up the new logo. Known as Georgia Facet, it combines multifaceted exterior angles with soft, rounded interiors on each form, visually communicating the breadth of experiences people have at the museum and the variety of our offerings. The all-important G at the beginning of our name coincidentally echoes some legacy materials from the university, calling it to mind subtly. You’ll see Georgia Facet not just in the logo but in headers throughout our materials.
Our new body copy typeface is Aktiv Grotesk, a versatile, functional, elegant sans-serif typeface that supports more than 1300 languages. You’ll see it on our labels in the galleries, also designed by Pentagram, as we phase it in.
Pentagram also created a new color palette for the museum, perhaps the clearest way to tie us more strongly to the University of Georgia as a whole. We said, “don’t make it orange” many, many times, and although they’re not familiar with the intense rivalries of SEC football, they listened. Instead, you’ll find plenty of UGA’s Bulldog Red, Arch Black and Chapel Bell White as well as its Glory Glory, an intense, energetic red from its secondary color palette. There are other colors, too, with yellow and fuchsia available to provide a distinguishing pop. You’ll find examples of the new branding and color palette in the Museum Shop, where we’re about to be selling new logo items that we think you’ll love.
Georgia Museum staff spent the summer implementing the new brand standards on everything from gallery maps to exterior and interior signage, T-shirts, letterhead, business cards, tablecloths, print materials and much more. They also dove into a website redesign with Lifted Logic, a firm out of Kansas City, Missouri, that should launch this fall.
We believe that the new look and the process of thinking through who we are have set us on a solid footing as we move toward our next milestone anniversary, with our eyes always on the goal of a world with More Art.
Related events include:
- a lecture by Eddie Opara, a partner at the design studio Pentagram, on September 18 at 5:30 p.m.
Authored by:
Hillary Brown
