(from pentagram.com) New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In the 1970s the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice was united with the New York museum under the aegis of the Guggenheim Foundation, establishing a precedent for an institution with an increasingly global footprint that now includes destinations in Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and will eventually include the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
Over the course of many years Abbott Miller has worked with the Guggenheim on various identity and publication projects. Recently he was asked to design a new identity and website for the Guggenheim Foundation that features the typeface that he originally commissioned for the Guggenheim’s magazine in 1996. Based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s lettering on the facade of the Guggenheim, Jonathan Hoefler’s font Verlag is now the lingua franca of the global Guggenheim. Miller and his team developed the design for the Foundation’s website as a “front door” to the collection of museums. ID Society produced the site based on Pentagram’s design.
The new Guggenheim site has been named the best cultural institution website in this year’s Webby Awards.
Miller first started working for the Guggenheim in 1996, when he designed the museum’s magazine. For the magazine’s masthead, Miller looked at the original art deco lettering on the façade of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim building. Miller worked with type designer Jonathan Hoefler to create the custom-designed typeface that was based on these letterforms, developing various weights and italic and bold versions. Initially proprietary, this typeface is now available as the font Verlag. Over the years the typeface has become the de facto brand for the museum, especially when utilized as a signature logotype for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In developing an identity for the Foundation, Miller has once again used Verlag, but this time in uppercase, to suggest a kind of über-Guggenheim or parent organization. This creates a subtle hierarchy between the Foundation and its constituent museums.
The Foundation website that Miller has designed similarly acts as front door or gateway to the five museums. A simple menu bar at the top of the site allows for navigation between locations and the Foundation itself. Within the individual museum sites the navigation is more complex, reflecting the unusually deep content of the sites, which allow visitors to browse the online collections of each museum. A blog-like editorial format is used for news of current exhibitions, events and activities.
Project Team: Abbott Miller, partner-in-charge and designer; John Kudos, designer. Website development: ID Society.
