New Museum
New Art New Ideas
For nearly five decades, the New Museum has curated at the avant garde of art, technology, and culture. To help reach new audiences that crave a more approachable experience of art, The New Museum’s redesigned website takes on the tone of a warm, communal guide. With goals of enhanced immersion, exploration, and community building, the redesigned experience provides fresh context at every turn — with deepened exhibition storytelling, a focus on live events, and more.
Our Role:
Art Direction
Visual and Site Design
Brand Guidelines
Site Development
Collaborators:
New Museum
A window to a new experience
The New Museum’s brand system was originally built around their iconic wordmark, used as a series of practical blocks that expand vertically to house supporting text. Athletics embraced this idea of opening and expanding, and crafted an updated system with the flexibility to move vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, accommodating text, image, and video. This fresh approach becomes an entry point; a portal to a reimagined museum experience for audiences all over the world.
Making the community visible
For the New Museum, art is deeply social. This philosophy is palpable on a visit to the museum, where patrons of all backgrounds and ages can be seen gathering, reflecting, and learning about themselves and their world.
The refreshed brand reflects this ethos. In the broader landscape of museums and galleries, art is typically photographed in large, empty rooms, producing a sense of austerity. Our approach to photography and video places an emphasis on The New Museum as a social hub. A vibrant community is shown engaging with exhibitions, museum programming, and artists themselves.
Art in context
To help refocus the brand story, it was imperative for Athletics to deepen the supportive utility of the site experience. The website is a principal touchpoint for The New Museum brand, and beyond refining certain core functions — ticket purchases and event calendars among them — we enhanced the site’s ability to build context for The New Museum’s various audiences.
A new exhibition page, for instance, surfaces not only details about the specific show, but supplemental resources, upcoming related events, similar works from the museum’s digital archive, and more. All of this aims to make contemporary art more accessible and understandable, whether the user is walking the halls of the museum or researching from the other side of the globe.
Bold, scalable, and holistic
The refreshed brand system goes beyond digital to bend, flex, and brighten the entire ecosystem of the museum’s experiences and touchpoints. From interior signage to advertising, social assets, and covetable merchandise, the bold identity reflects The New Museum’s brand principles — clear, smart, bold, and human — and its larger creative theme of creating intersections and awakenings.
A foundation for the future
Looking ahead, The New Museum’s OMA-designed building expansion will double its exhibition space, creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs, and establishing a permanent home for their cultural incubator, NEW INC. The New Museum’s refreshed identity and site provide a future-focused suite of tools that will complement the building expansion and reinforce their belief that contemporary art is a vital social force.
“The Athletics team was quick to understand what makes the New Museum unique, and translated that insight into a distinctive and inviting new website that is true to the museum’s core identity.”
Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum