Kanal by Base Design
This week, Base Design's branding for Brussels' only museum of modern and contemporary art and architecture, Kanal, and Studio NARI's slick new look for coffee machine company 3TEMP.
The new museum
Opinion by Emily Gosling
Kanal is a museum-to-be with an admirable yet bold raison d’être that defies much of what we think we know about the nature of highbrow cultural sites: not a “finished institution, but a cultural project in motion,” as its general director Yves Goldstein puts it.
Based in Brussels, Kanal will – somewhat surprisingly – become the city’s only museum of modern and contemporary art and architecture when it opens in November this year in the 40,000 m² former Citroën building.
Billed as a “transformative” and “visionary, ever-evolving public project” that merges art, architecture, performance, food and public space, Kanal’s brand world has been created by the Brussels studio of Base Design (The Huntington, 12, Murray’s Cheese, Divine Farmer).
The core ethos of the identity design mirrors that of the museum itself: just as Kanal aims to be “engaging with the city and its people in a way that is open, plural, and in constant evolution”, according to Goldstein, the branding is fluid, expansive and even in static applications, in a sort of perpetual motion that looks to harness the idea of a dialogue – with visitors, with the city of Brussels, between creative disciplines, between exhibits and visitors.
Indeed, with a project like this surely flexibility is really the only route: it’s one thing to refresh an existing museum brand, but likely incredibly rare to be tasked with creating a brand from scratch for such a vast cultural institution from the ground up.
The plus side is that there’s no heritage to retain, or to attempt to shoehorn into something more contemporary (as briefs for existing similar sites seem to generally be wrestling with); but the downside is almost the same – how do you create gravitas within modernity for something so new, but of such inherent, almost instant cultural importance?…
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3TEMP by Studio NARI
Opinion by Emily Gosling
If you had to guess what 3TEMP is and does, it’s hard to imagine many people would come up with the right answer: with no prior knowledge of the company, it sounds like the sort of thing a half-arsed episode of Black Mirror could come up with – some kind of temping agency but everyone is actually AI, or perhaps a dating app for a nice audience of those seeking short-term thrupples.
It is, however, a manufacturer of specialty coffee equipment that started out in 2013 in Arvika, Sweden, which recently had its identity overhauled by London-based Studio NARI (Blueberry, Living Things, Tenzing).
Studio NARI worked across the brand strategy and positioning, including developing the brand framework and garnering audience and cultural insights; going on to create new identity systems, art direction and visual language, verbal identity, packaging design, digital design, and brand design elements spanning 3TEMP’s physical environments and activations.
What it did not touch was the name, nor the wordmark. I initially hated the name, thanks not only to the confusion outlined in the intro to the piece, but because it also just seemed weird – sort of like a very dated vision of a sci-fi-ish future – and for the purely aesthetic reason that it’s just a bit ugly, with its jarring mixture of numeral and capitals.
The wordmark almost makes it work within the context of what 3TEMP is and does, however – not quite, but almost.
Studio NARI had to work with that existing logo, however, as its senior designer Dom Vine outlines: “One of the main challenges was working with 3TEMP’s existing linear logotype,” he explains…
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