Rebranding a museum for the community it serves
Based in a mid-sized, midwestern city in Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) is a quietly exceptional institution, housing Picassos and Monets, Calder sculptures and renaissance masterworks, alongside one of the world’s most renowned collections of glass antiquities. Yet it hadn’t had a visual refresh for decades. In 2023 they commissioned Detroit-based agency Lafayette American to create a new design system and website that could engage a modern audience.
The museum’s new T-shaped logo – taken from the shape of the building – is stamped with TMA’s initials, and appears across digital and real-life environments, including merchandising. Using AR to digitally bring the T to life on campus, it becomes a physical sculpture, leaning on its side, while online, the logo adds motion, shifting as the user scrolls the TMA website. The initials lend the mark a sense of physicality, while the movement drives dynamism. Other points in the rebrand are equally anti-static, incorporating a shifting palette of colours from artworks featured. The fonts chosen reflect the heritage of high modernism and the museum's earlier history: at once steadfastly institutional and timelessly open.
To execute the project, the team at Lafayette American and their project partners looked into the 120+ year history of TMA and past iterations of its visual grammar. They also looked at the modern audience for the museum – exploring what the institution means to the local Toledo community today. Quickly, the team realised that stakeholders on the project were not just the museum director and its board: the stakeholders were also the families that lived down the street, and visited the museum every week.
“To make this work stick, you need to be talking to not just the museum director and not just the head of marketing,” says Toby Barlow, Chief Creative Officer at Lafayette American. “You need to talk to the people who sit and stare at the artwork, and stare at the people all day – the security guards, who stand in the corner anonymously. You have to reach out to the people who live in the neighbourhood, who are using this as their backyard or their village square […] It made it impossible to be cynical in any way, shape or form.”
The project won a D&AD Yellow Pencil in the Brand Refresh Category, as well as several other awards. Asked about its success, Head of Design Meg Jannott says: “As a designer, you're always wanting to make sure that the client is happy. And then, of course, that the brand is strategically built to deliver on all the principles that it stands for. But in this case we also felt a great responsibility to the community. It was really, really wonderful to [hear] people say, ‘I've lived in Toledo my whole life, and I'm just so proud to say this is my museum… I can't wait to see the identity in real life, I can't wait to visit.’ Those are the most rewarding moments.”