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| Fred & Farid New York, Getty logo, 2026 |
It's a busy time for museum branding mavens. The Getty has unveiled a new logo by Fred & Farid, replacing the Saul Bass design adopted in 1993. Last year the Huntington introduced a new "H" monogram with bespoke typography and palette. The Philadelphia Museum of Art also got a new griffin logo and name ("Philadelphia Art Museum"), only to roll back the latter after critics began calling it PhArt. That's a reminder that museums can be downstream of culture. The acronym "LACMA" was apparently invented by the public, not a branding expert.
The Philadelphia logo actually looks like something. That's rare. Museum directors tend to read more into a brand than regular civilians might. ("The Huntington's new brand visually unifies its Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, showcasing the depth of each collection and the powerful connections and cross-fertilization among them." Huh? It's an H.) The Getty's new logo is also conceived as a puzzle picture. The four quadrilaterals represent travertine blocks or mosaic tiles—and the Getty Museum, Foundation, Conservation Institute, and Research Institute.
The best logos can be appreciated as great works of design. Saul Bass' work falls into this category. Yet I've never felt that art museum logos as a group have any more visual punch than those for corporate clients. Why?
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| Base Design, Huntington logo, 2025 |
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| Gretel, Philadelphia Art Museum logo, 2025 (since modified) |
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| 2×4 Design, in collaboration with John Baldessari, LACMA logo, 2007 |
Comments
The New-York Historical Society change in brand is even more stupid. I hope that can be turned around. ...The New York Historical!? What is that? Where do they find these people?
Institutions supposedly devoted to aesthetics and visual excellence not creating good graphic work for themselves is like UPS hiring drivers who have poor eyesight or the NFL hiring players who aren't very coordinated. Or a restaurant hiring a chef who has problems frying an egg.
Griffins decorate the roofline corners of the main building, which was completed in 1928, at a time when the fascist arc of European history was ascendant.
See one at the following link:
https://pin.it/5vYf4u4Wv
Way too similar to the way that most luxury cars now have sheet metal designed as a big indistinguishable SUV. I recall once being able to detect from a distance a "Mercedes Benz," "Jaguar" or "Cadillac" (at least during the time of the Seville). Now way too many autos have become a gigantic generic pile.
https://www.dreamstime.com/griffin-perched-corner-roof-philadelphia-museum-art-pictured-bronze-casting-legendary-creature-body-tail-image119367576
On top of that, you could have superimposed a "G" in some updated font. Or, if the Getty wanted to get more creative, how about four different "G"'s over the checquer pattern, one for each significant period in the collection: a Trajan "G," an illuminated "G", a Renaissance "G", and a more modern "G".
Using the travertine as a base might have worked if the logo replicated one of the standard travertine patterns, French or Roman pattern. But since travertine is not typically laid in the pattern of the "G" in the new logo, it seems contrived. I think the Getty's own travertine is laid in a linear pattern. The linear pattern is the chequer pattern without the alternating squares.
--- J. Garcin