Our Work With Miami Art Museum Twice Recognized

Actar D, BaseDesign, BaseWords 10/30/08 | Identity, Museums

PRINT magazine’s 2008 Regional Design Annual

Our work with Miami Art Museum has just been featured in two publications. PRINT magazine’s 2008 Regional Design Annual, which calls itself “the most comprehensive survey of graphic design in the United States,” presents the year’s “best creative work produced from Hawaii to Rhode Island and all points in between.” As last year’s edition was compiled from more than 20,000 submissions, we’re quite happy that our work has been selected for two recognitions in the 2008 issue—one for our capital campaign identity for the museum, and one for our catalog for its exhibition Work In Progress: Herzog & de Meuron’s Miami Art Museum. Our MAM work is also featured in the latest installment of Gestalten’s best-selling logo series, Los Logos 4.

In 2006 the Miami Art Museum commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to design a new museum building, to be constructed on a long-neglected waterfront site in downtown Miami. To supplement financial commitments from the city and county, MAM later that year launched a capital campaign targeting Miami-based corporations and residents.

The museum brought us on to design the identity for the campaign, which will be rolled out in three phases before the new museum opens, in 2012. As the goal of the campaign is to appeal to Miami-based companies and residents, our principal concept was to to link the museum directly with the city, literally putting MAM in Miami.

Miami Art Museum capital campaign logo concept

Rather than create a single logo for MAM’s capital campaign, we designed a flexible system fusing visuals and written messages. Exclamation points, a recurring element in the identity, appear in a variety of written messages, conveying enthusiasm for the project. The color aqua is used to hint at the waterfront location of the new museum and the live plants that will feature in the new architecture. In these ways, the identity functions on multiple levels and creates a voice for the campaign rather than a static logo.

campaign press kit

While the campaign is still in its first phase, our work so far has encompassed stationery, a capital campaign brochure, and the invitation and catalog for the exhibition, which provided a glimpse of the new museum last December–April. Subsequent exhibitions and catalogs will reveal updates to the status of the museum until its opening.