The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Where Art Meets Life is the idea at the centre of Koto’s rebrand of the Norton Museum of Art – the recognition that the West Palm Beach institution is as much a place where art becomes part of everyday life as somewhere to look at it, taking visitors from gardens to galleries to evening events. The global creative agency was brought in for the brand strategy, the verbal and visual identity, and applications spanning posters, brochures, floor maps, advertising and website, at a moment when a further expansion with Foster + Partners is getting underway, and the museum is setting the stage for its next chapter.

The idea came out of a week Koto spent inside the museum, exploring the archives, speaking with staff, meeting the architect and running ‘vox pops’ with visitors. What struck the team was the sheer range of experience on offer. “It’s art, but it’s also life. It’s a museum, but it’s also a community gathering place,” Senior Strategy Director Katie Hughes tells us. The positioning then crystallised around one line from the immersion: asked to name the museum’s biggest competitor, a stakeholder answered, ‘The beach.’ “It highlighted that the Norton isn’t simply competing with other museums,” Hughes explains. “It’s competing for people’s leisure time.”

Part of the work was closing a gap between the museum and its own image, with the previous identity having fallen behind the reality of the institution. “When people visited, there was often this feeling of, ‘Wow, this is so much better than I expected,’” Design Director David Shatan-Pardo tells us. Koto’s ambition was to change that first encounter – to “move from being somewhere people discover by chance to somewhere people travel specifically to experience,” rather than a hidden gem stumbled on by visitors in town for the weather. That meant serving two audiences at once, the affluence associated with Palm Beach alongside communities that have not historically engaged with art institutions, and opening the door to newer visitors while keeping faith with existing ones. “You don’t need an art history degree to enjoy the Norton. Everyone should feel welcome,” Shatan-Pardo notes – a philosophy the museum already practised through its family programming and education work, and one the identity simply had to make visible.

Much of the identity was drawn back out of the museum’s archive, though nothing was revived solely on nostalgia. “Heritage is incredibly valuable, but it can also become baggage if you’re not careful,” Hughes tells us, so anything brought forward had to still speak to the Norton of today. "Everything had to earn its place by reinforcing that central narrative," Shatan-Pardo adds. A historic logo based on Claes Oldenburg’s typewriter-eraser sculpture was admired but set aside for failing that test; the wordmark earned its keep. Redrawn as a custom serif, it “communicates that the Norton is an established cultural institution, while the wider proportions and tilted O’s introduce warmth and individuality,” he explains.

Reviving the Diana seal was, by the team’s account, one of its favourite parts of the project. The figure is Paul Manship’s Diana, the sculpture Ralph Norton commissioned for the museum’s founding in 1941, brought back into the identity by way of the museum's 50th-anniversary mark. Koto tested other archival motifs, the museum’s banyan tree and its architecture among them, but they “felt too literal,” Shatan-Pardo notes, whereas Diana stood for something larger. She “embodied independence, grace, focus and a trailblazing spirit,” he continues, “all qualities that felt remarkably aligned with the Norton itself.”

The sans serif typography is set in Sharp Type’s Centra No. 2, placed against the serif as a deliberate pairing – the wordmark pays homage to the museum’s heritage while the sans is drawn from the modern building Foster + Partners designed. “Duality is a fixture of the museum’s experience and core to our identity – art/life, east/west, old/new,” Shatan-Pardo explains. That duality reaches into the smallest details: the 40° tilt of the ‘N’ in the wordmark is a through-line across the system, worked into the diagonal strokes of the custom icons and, at a larger scale, into a slash motif Koto used for containers, layouts and supporting graphics – the point, in the studio’s telling, where art crosses into life.

Both the slash and the compositions around it depend on colour, which Koto set up to never quite settle. Rather than a fixed palette, the identity draws its colour from the work on display, so it shifts with the collection: where a show has a throughline colour across its pieces, that becomes the unifying tone; where it does not, the colour comes from the dominant piece, and often a work is simply left to stand on its own. That adaptive palette also keeps the slash from competing with the art. “The adaptive colour palette allows us to create very intentional contrast between the work framed by the slash and the rest of the composition,” Shatan-Pardo details, so one graphic works cleanly while busier settings, such as wheatpasting or a run of digital screens, are kept simple. The seasonal drift is deliberate. “The museum is different on every visit – we built the identity to embrace that dynamism.”

Koto came to the Norton as something of an outsider to the sector. The pitch put it up against studios with deeper arts-and-culture records, including Pentagram and Base Design, and the studio leaned into the difference. “We hadn’t traditionally worked extensively in arts and culture,” Shatan-Pardo tells us, treating that as an asset. “I think our relative newness to the category was actually an advantage,” Hughes adds. “We approached the project with fresh eyes and enormous curiosity.” What the studio offered in place of a museum portfolio was “enormous passion for the sector and a different perspective.”