National Design Museum Gets New Look

Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum—commonly referred to as the Cooper-Hewitt—recently re-opened after a 3 year hiatus, featuring more gallery space, updated amenities, and interactive exhibits. But the most surprising update came in what you would assume a national design museum already had: a consistent visual identity. Owing to the fact that the museum is at least somewhat guided and funded by the government, you can understand this patchwork of styles, themes, and typography. Luckily, the museum took the opportunity of the renovation to start from scratch and give the Cooper-Hewitt the cohesive brand it deserves.

The museum—now known as Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum—looked to the creative team at Pentagram New York for this graphic overhaul. Pentagram transformed a mélange of type and design into a minimalist look to define the museum going forward. For the core of the new brand, the team created a custom typeface: Cooper Hewitt. The sans serif typeface was designed in conjunction with Village Type and Design’s Chester Jenkins and is based on Galaxie Polaris Condensed. The new typeface comes in seven different weights, each in both regular and italic flavors. And, in keeping with this being “our” museum, the Cooper Hewitt typeface is available in OpenType format as a free download.

For the museum’s logo, Pentagram also kept things deceptively simple, neatly stacking “Cooper” on top of “Hewitt” to form a perfectly-spaced, easily-scaled rectangular wordmark. The designers focused on keeping the overall look simple, to avoid competing with any of the design work on display. The new look is tied together starting at the building’s exterior signage and continuing on throughout the museum on exhibit signage, wayfinding, and adorns press items and the museum website. Whether you call it by its full name, or just The Cooper-Hewit, the museum now looks purposefully-designed and ready for the next century.

Erica Gamet has been involved in the graphics industry for over 35 years. She is a speaker, writer, trainer, and content creator focusing on Adobe InDesign, Apple Keynote, and varied production topics. She is a regular presenter at CreativePro Week, regular contributor to CreativePro Magazine, and has spoken at Canada’s ebookcraft, Adobe MAX, and Making Design in Oslo, Norway. Find Erica online at the CreativePro YouTube channel, CreativeLive.com and through her own YouTube channel. When she isn’t at her computer she’s probably daydreaming about travel or living in a Nordic noir landscape.

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