The exciting building of the New National Gallery is clearly symbolic on its own, which gave us enough inspiration to design a new logo, reflecting on its architectural elements.
For both logos, we originally built from the same column. The two rectangles were sliced into smaller pieces of different sizes, whilst keeping an evenly long horizontal piece to emphasize their relationship even more. The spot values of the resulting logos are similar, yet they reflect the unique character of the institutions and are visually distinct from each other.
The line module structure also defined the formal features of the icon set, which has limited the graphical work within the framework of a strong geometric rule system. During the design, we used our own set of rules to create a single family of pictograms.
Due to the museum is under the protection of historic buildings, the information surfaces could not be fixed directly on the marble. Therefore, in the lobby, both the navigation content and the promotion of the current exhibition appears on a stretched canvas, just like a painting. Elsewhere in the building, we mainly used a dark grey base so that they fit better into the enterior.
Another important challenge was to develop a system that could easily respond to the ever-changing needs of the institution, as the museum’s refurbishment is still ongoing. Such solutions include foil-cut navigation contents mounted directly on the wall, as well as interchangeable panel elements of the information blocks surrounding the columns.
The maps float in front of the white wall with their spacers so that they are highlighted by their own shadows; whilst the information blocks are on black plexiglasses, flat-mounted onto the wall and thus separate from the graphics.