Okay, let’s get it out of the way… yes, there are elements of Pentagram’s 2018 Library of Congress in Leo Burnett’s work for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). In both projects, type is a frame for images of archive material. Is it BP&O’s responsibility to acknowledge similarities in all the work we publish, tracking a typology back to the start of formalised corporate identity as a discipline? Well perhaps. But then, perhaps, there are few genuinely original ideas in branding today. And perhaps it’s more interesting to look at the way the concept is played out.

Leo Burnett takes Pentagram’s type-splitting device further, appropriately testing the limits of today’s typeface technology to the extremes – from legible to frankly unreadable, and stuffed full of stuff. The central idea here is to capture the history of our planet through 13 million moments in time: bones, butterflies, portraits, sculptures, textiles, among all sorts of objects and ephemera. Variable type is the mechanism that gives life and distinction to this premise, opening to reveal individual artefacts from a vast library, and in the process exploring the interplay of planetary scale and singular perspective, as well as the tension between a hidden archive and the visible curated spaces.

But to return to the what. Despite being the largest and most iconic art institution in Canada, the appeal of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) didn’t match the extent of its archive. With a desire to reach a ‘younger and more diverse audience’ (though it’s not clear exactly where/why it was falling short, access, representation etc), Leo Burnett was tasked with helping to ‘jolt and overhaul every touchpoint’. More specifically, to define and better express ROM’s mission to ‘transform lives by helping people understand the past, so that they can make sense of the present and in turn come together to shape a shared future’.

The rebrand includes a new wordmark, signage, wayfinding, photography, brand collateral and uniforms, as well as a custom typeface in collaboration with Colophon. With seven weights alongside four different widths, all super condensed, ‘ROM Coign’ is designed to expand and contract, creating ‘the sensation of diving into the single moments of our collective history, and then pulling back to reveal its immense scope’. ‘Every character represents a single stitch in time… all knit together’, Leo Burnett explains. Staked together in this ‘immortal timeline’, the relationship between type and image is unconventional; type begins to look like the spines of books on a shelf, punctuated by forward-facing covers.

The range of variability in Colophon’s typeface also affords the brand enormous flexibility in application. Tall, condensed letterforms call out floor numbers on signage and, out front, feature as supergraphics as high as the entrance ways. The treatment can adapt, running along the thin surface of a pencil, scaling down for artefact labelling, or filling wide canvases to give the impression of scale. The latter is particularly impactful when given a long horizontal length, like a subway of exhibition space.

Flexibility, continuity, the relationship between text and image, the readable and the imperceptible. These are the qualities that give life and breadth to the creative concept. While we’ve seen a similar aesthetic treatment before, Leo Burnett goes further, taking advantage of the technology now available in type design, and is not afraid to break the rules around readability to convey a bigger idea.