Penn Museum
Strategy & Design
Opportunity
We partnered with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to create a comprehensive positioning and naming strategy, including a new graphic identity and corresponding guidelines. Our collaboration with the Penn Museum began in 2012, in a mission development process that resulted in a powerful articulation of the Museum’s intent: The Penn Museum transforms understanding of the human experience. Over the past five years, the Penn Museum has worked to bring that mission to life by inviting in new audiences, experimenting with how to best engage them, and embarking on an ambitious re-design of its signature galleries—all with the aim of sharing the Museum’s groundbreaking scholarship, excavations, and objects with the public in an engaging and inviting way.
Services
- Leadership Work Sessions
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Audience Research
- Positioning and Naming Toolkit
- Visual Identity and Guidelines
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Courtesy of the Penn Museum
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Process
In the first phase of the project, we conducted a rigorous brand and materials audit, work sessions with key members of the Museum’s leadership, stakeholder interviews, and audience research, all of which bolstered our work in articulating the Penn Museum’s unique position: defining who the Museum is, what drives it, and what impact it can make on the world.
Once we established the new name and position, we brought all of our work to life, translating the Museum’s new identity into a visual language to convey a spirit of openness in advance of the Museum unveiling several galleries following a multi million-dollar renovation.
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While the former Museum branding matched the University of Pennsylvania’s coat of arms and the same traditional typeface, the new logo and brand architecture aimed to set the Museum apart from Penn. The wide M of the new logo represents a gateway for people to enter, with the two arches of the M resembling two A’s, symbolizing the museum’s specialty in archaeology and anthropology.
