The Museum of Narratives (also known as MoN Takanawa) is located in Tokyo’s Takanawa Gateway City, and opened a couple of months ago in March 2026. It’s something of an experimental museum with a cross-disciplinary programme spanning visual art, installations, and performances themed around everything from society to art to science, manga, and anime; merging traditional Japanese culture with hyper-modern, cutting-edge technology.

MoN’s building is equally innovative: a space spanning three basement levels, six above-ground floors and a rooftop, the building was designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates as a ‘spiral oasis’ combining traditional wood with modern, sustainable architecture, recycled materials and native Japanese vegetation.

That spiral oasis idea – as well as the museum’s central belief that culture shouldn’t be a ‘look don’t touch’ thing cased in vitrines or held up on plinths, but something participatory and shared; living, breathing, and ever-evolving – is reflected beautifully in the charming brand identity design for MoN by Pentagram partners Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell.

Petnagram (Chateau Engalin, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Super Peach) was responsible for the visual and verbal identity, branding and naming. The name is smart in that it works in a way in which MoN is more than simply an abbreviation of Museum of Narratives, but a moniker packed with its own meaning: it takes its name from the Japanese word “mon”, meaning gate – a reference to Takanawa’s history as a gateway to Japan. 

The full title, meanwhile, succinctly communicates that idea of culture as an ongoing story, continually rewriting itself and being rewritten – alive, twisting, turning, and joyfully unpredictable.

All of those things– the twists and turns and joy and surprise – coalesce here in one of my favourite museum identities in recent times, and one that’s both so simple and so clever in packing a very deceptively straightforward series of visual devices with an absolute tonne of information about the whos, whats, and whys of what the space actually is and does.

Said series of graphic devices is a number of beguiling spirals, which also lend the logo at the heart of the identity its form, built from a single swirling form that satisfyingly resolves into the letters ‘M’,’ O’ and ‘N’.

The prominence of the spiral stems directly from the museum’s inaugural exhibition, Spiral, Spiral: Evolving Human Narratives, which examines the recurring form across art, science, society and traditional culture and explores the symbolic and visual power of the spiral as a universal motif.

It’s a neat piece of visual shorthand which expands and contracts across applications, informing everything from layouts and motion behaviours to hierarchy and scale. It works really nicely for merch – I love how they’ve directly translated the logo to some earrings, for instance, which demonstrate just how seamlessly this identity shifts from 2D to 3D, vast to tiny, serious to cute.

Working alongside that central spiral is a simple linear bar that acts as a foil to all that circular movement, helping organise, frame and structure information. Both elements frequently disappear beyond the edges of the page or screen, morphing and bleeding and worming around in a way that’s hypnotising to look at both in static and motion forms. There are no obvious beginnings or endings here; appropriately enough for an institution centred on narratives, everything feels as though it is part of a larger story still unfolding.

The strategic and conceptual underpinning for the identity is, according to Pentagram, the idea of “dimensional time” – the notion that culture isn’t linear, but something cyclical, layered and constantly reinterpreted, always in motion. It’s an elegant response to the challenge of creating a framework capable of accommodating everything that MoN does and shows, and intends to do in future – as well as reflecting the unusual architecture of the building itself.

When it comes to typography, the identity prizes clarity and legibility – as well as the fonts’ ability to appear seamless and connected whether in Japanese characters or Roman, for English text. As such, lettering for both languages appears with the same visual weight across headlines, interpretation, signage and supporting information.

Pentagram opted to use Walter Neue by Berlin-based foundry Dinamo, a doggedly functional yet somehow friendly sans serif that pays homage to the work of Swiss graphic/type designer and educator Walter Käch and which works really well here in its blend of clarity, legibility and a sense of inclusiveness – all in all, very museum-worthy, yet absolutely modern and future-facing.

Likewise with the approach to colour, things are very much bright, breezy, and all-ages-friendly, yet manage to still be a little bit different: two primaries – bold paintbox red and blue, and one secondary in a fresh, vibrant shade of green. These apparently were inspired by the landscape and cultural context of Takanawa as a place (water, land, and sun – assuming the latter must be the red, since there’s no yellow here).

Yet they don’t feel like organic colours, which is no bad thing: they’re – and I mean this in a very good way – somewhere between much-missed 90s highstreet luminary, The Early Learning Centre (the shades are almost identical to those in this adorable little toy till, in fact), and the Olympics logo. So yes, subjectively speaking, two design icons, if in very different ways.

It’s little surprise that the idea of storytelling is central to the verbal identity for a site literally called the Museum of Narratives. The copy and tone of voice reflects that emphasis by encouraging participation and active engagement through warm, accessible language which speaks to an international audience while remaining firmly connected to the particular cultural and social context of Takanawa.

Rather than presenting culture as something fixed, archived and preserved, the identity – like MoN itself – reflects a more fluid understanding of how ideas move through time. Indeed, the brand itself feels open-ended, both in its current visual forms and the way it can so easily evolve alongside the institution it represents.

For all its conceptual heft, though, what makes this identity so successful is its remarkable lightness of touch. And also, the simple joyfulness that imbues even the most perfunctory – I just adore that signage, and dare anyone not to. Pentagram has taken a single form and imbued it with an extraordinary amount of meaning, creating a system that feels simultaneously rigorous and playful, highly functional yet rich with symbolism. And whether printed on a poster or writhing around in motion design, it always, always feels so brilliantly alive.