Art and Design
HotDog by SMLXL
From the moment I turned the sound up (as per instructions) on the ‘about’ page of the HotDog website, safe to say I was obsessed with this brand and its branding. It’s laugh out loud hilarious – I truly loled, as did the person I was sharing a room with, and as I’m sure anyone within eye- or ear-shot would...
Kanal by Base Design
Kanal is a museum-to-be with an admirable yet bold raison d’être that defies much of what we think we know about the nature of highbrow cultural sites: not a “finished institution, but a cultural project in motion,” as its general director Yves Goldstein puts it. Based in Brussels, Kanal will – somewhat surprisingly – become the city’s only museum of...
Kunsthalle Basel by Porto Rocha
Basel is a fascinating place – beautiful but unassuming, relatively small but the undisputed capital of the contemporary art world. Not only is it the host of – as you’d guess from the name – Art Basel, the Art Fair that arguably forms the pinnacle of the global art market calendar, but it also has one of the highest densities...
The Huntington by Base Design
There’s a particular kind of challenge that crops up again and again in cultural branding – not obscurity exactly, but partial recognition. The sort where an institution is famous for one thing, quietly exceptional at several others, and yet rarely understood as a coherent whole. The Huntington, a century-old cultural and research institution in Southern California, sits squarely in that...
Eternal Research by Cotton
Niche/difficult electronic music types and brand design nerds are rarely found too far from one another; often, indeed, they’re one in the same. It’s little surprise really when you look at the typographic wonders to be found across the spectrum of things like vintage synthesisers – the sublime curves of ‘Omnichord’ or the strangely pagan-ish letterforms on a Prophet-5, to...
INTL 2025 by Warriors Studio and NAM
International Assembly began life as Graphic Design Festival Scotland back in 2014, founded by then-recent-ish grads Beth Wilson, James Gilchrist. The pair also helm Warriors Studio, which has been taking care of the festival’s creative direction, branding and design since its inaugural edition, too. GDFS became International Assembly, or INTL, in 2020; and when the new name and identity, also...
Philadelphia Art Museum by Gretel
Creating museum and gallery identities must be both a dream brief and an intimidating prospect for brand designers; a poisoned chalice of sorts. We hear the same challenges time and again when agencies discuss such projects: creating a brand that’s both strong and ownable but which lets the artefacts/art take centre stage; an identity that takes an institution into the...
IAAC by Mucho
The IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) is an organisation which boasts a remit that feels both nigh-on impossibly wide but also hyperspecific. Based in Barcelona and founded in 2001 as a hub for innovation in architecture and design, IAAC describes itself as ‘a platform for producing knowledge to shape the future of cities, buildings and society’. The long...
Windham Campbell Prizes by Pentagram
Back in 2013, Michael Bierut’s team at Pentagram (Twelve Labs, Becan & Natural History Museum) created the identity for Yale University’s inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes, a major literary award that honours outstanding achievement in the fields of fiction, non-fiction and drama. Bestowed by the estate of the writer Donald Windham and his companion Sandy M. Campbell, the awards are administered...
Siuru by Bond
Estonia’s Siuru plays with important questions, subverting and, at the same time, fulfilling expectations. Is it an art museum? A library? A cinema? Or a cultural institution? For a Bond (Veikkausliiga, Saaristo, Cable Factory) the design studio in charge of developing a brand identity for Siuru, this raised the concern, how do you brand something that seeks not to be characterised...
Sustana by Collins
For non-design nuts or print nerds, paper might seem pretty high up in the scale of banality and boringness. That’s likely the reason that the Wernham Hogg paper company was the setting of The Office: paper, and Slough, formed an easy sitcom shorthand for all that was unremarkable, trivial, and emphatically dry. But in fact, there’s a lot more to...
PAC NYC by Porto Rocha
There have been some brilliant logo designs inspired by the very buildings they represent. The Centre Pompidou, for instance, bears a powerfully stark logo that’s been largely unchanged since it was first created in the 1970s: six black stripes crossed by two zigzags representing the site’s ‘caterpillar’ escalator, one of the most famous parts of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’...