The Serpentine Galleries' new visual identity was designed by Pentagram’s Marina Willer and Wolff Olins’ Brian Boylan. Image: Pentagram
The new logo features a brand new typeface and most notably, a big, gaping aperture that can be resized and repositioned anywhere in the word Serpentine. Image: Pentagram
It's meant to project a sense of openness. Image: Pentagram
It was unveiled to coincide with the opening of the Zaha Hadid-designed Sackler Gallery. Image: Pentagram
The entrance to The Magazine, The Serpentine's restaurant. Image: Pentagram
The restaurant's menus are meant to reflect Hadid's undulating structure. It's one of the more successful applications of the new branding. Image: Pentagram
The new branding in front of Sou Fujimoto's temporary pavilion. Image: Pentagram
The typeface, with its mix of sharp and rounded edges is supposed to be "approachable, welcoming and thought-provoking and challenging." Image: Pentagram
Logos require a new level of elasticity since they’re going to be used on signs, paper, tablets, web and in video. Image: Pentagram
The Serpentine Gallery is having a moment of transformation. With the opening of Zaha Hadid’s undulating, tent-like Sackler Gallery earlier this month, the museum has expanded its physical space and elaborated on its name, referring to itself now as the Serpentine Galleries. In fact, the London art institution has gone full throttle on its Cinderella moment and has gotten itself an entirely new visual identity.
Designed by Pentagram’s Marina Willer and Wolff Olins’ Brian Boylan, the Serpentine’s new logo features a brand new typeface and most notably, a big, gaping aperture that can be resized and repositioned anywhere within the word Serpentine. So on one sign you’ll see ‘Ser—pentine Galleries’ while on another you’ll see ‘Serpen—tine Galleries.’ Check out the website right now, and you’ll read it as ‘Serpe—ntine.’ It’s an interesting choice, and one that Willer says is meant to point to the pervading theme of the Serpentine’s new identity: openness. “The concept came from the idea of the Serpentine being an open landscape for arts and culture,” explains Willer. “Open as in free, in the open (park) and open to new art forms and ideas.”
Requisite design tropes aside, the Serpentine’s logo is really an attempt to demonstrate that the gallery is more than just a place to hang art. Like most media-centric companies, the Serpentine is multifaceted—it’s a gallery, a restaurant, a cultural centerpiece amidst a sprawling park. But how do you explain that you’re actually many things though a simple logo? The Serpentine’s answer is the aperture, a hole that can be filled with a pretty photo of the park or an image from an upcoming exhibition depending on the occasion. It’s a smarter, better looking way to approach the idea of the logo as a customizable container, which other companies have unsuccessfully attempted. Think back to the failed ‘My__’ logo, which fell flat not just because it was lame design, but also because Myspace itself didn’t know what belonged in the blank.
Serpentine’s new logo offers total flexibility.
The Serpentine, for its part, seems to be aware of its value and what it offers the world, which helps to anchor the limitless possibilities of the aperture. Even beyond the conceptual ideas behind the new Serpentine identity, it’s true that more and more, logos require total flexibility. Like we saw with the Whitney’s responsive W, modern logos require a new level of elasticity since they’re going to be used on signs, paper, tablets, web and in video. An authoritarian logo has its merits, and it certainly conveys a cohesive sense of branding, but art museums in particular have the convenience, an obligation even, to push the boundaries of what we’re used to.
The accompanying logo typeface, designed by Pentagram’s Ian Osborne, is, for lack of a better word, quirky. With its mix of rounded and sharp edges, it’s definitely an update to the “englishness” of Graphic Thought Facility’s modified Monotype Grotesque that had been used across branding materials since 2009. Willer explains, “We used round and sharp corners on the logo typeface to be both approachable, welcoming and thought-provoking, challenging. With him [Osborne], we created a font that is modern and straightforward as we think the voice of Serpentine should be.” It hasn’t been universally loved, with some critics lambasting the font for being too much on an already visually-heavy palette. And true, when compared to the Serpentine’s stoic logo of the past, this one is certainly livelier and more inviting, even if it does try just a little too hard to be those things. When it’s all said and done though, the Serpentine got what it wanted (and needed) because this logo does feel—you have to admit—open.
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