New Work: National Museums Liverpool
Pentagram won an open competition to design the brand identity for the Museum of Liverpool, which is set to open in summer 2011. The project is the largest newly built museum in the UK for over a hundred years and is the world’s first “national” museum devoted to the history of a regional city.
The members of the National Museums Liverpool group are the Museum of Liverpool, World Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Merseyside Maritime Museum, International Slavery Museum, National Conservation Centre, Lady Lever Art Gallery and Sudley House .
The challenge for Angus Hyland and his team was to create a brand identity for the Museum of Liverpool that represented the culture of the city to the rest of the world.
Hyland identified that in order to transfer brand equity across the other seven venues in the National Museums Liverpool group the brief needed to be redefined to create an overarching brand identity for the group as a whole.
Using as his inspiration Carl Jung’s quote, “Liverpool is the pool of life” he designed a flexible solution linking all of the venues with a ribbon twisted to form the letter ‘L’. The reverse of the ribbon is decorated with a repeating pattern of the words “National Museums Liverpool” representing the oral nature of the city.
A vibrant family of brand identities was created each with a unique voice but using a common visual language. Each venue is colour coded and brought in line through the use of variants of the Soho font, this provides flexibility with each being allowed a different voice and life whilst still being endorsed by the group.