What it had to solve
Create an identity that sits at the centre of the museum's duality, promotes visits and reaches audiences beyond the gallery space.
The idea
Turn the building's two slanted walls into two capital A's pointing in different directions that move in unison.
How it works
One wall of the building faces the city and the other the Alatau mountains, and the logo has two capital A's that slide and bounce across assets. Early avant-garde A's 'lacked individuality' until a Studio Feixen font released with slanted alternate glyphs. Neue Montreal serves as secondary type, covering Cyrillic, Russian and Latin. The core palette is four shades of yellow drawn from Almaty's autumn, with black or white type, while a secondary palette is taken from the artworks and changes with each exhibition.
What it did
The It's Nice That article, published in April 2024, reports the delivered system and gives no visitor or audience results.
Background
Studio Thonik, based in Amsterdam, designed the identity for the Almaty Museum of Arts in Kazakhstan. The initial idea came from the still image of the two A's tilting in different directions, which is unusual for a studio that usually starts every project with motion and extracts stills from it.
Thonik partner Roy Terhorst said the slanted A's inspired the move to motion as a logical extension. The block colours of the secondary palette highlight artist titles and sit on a grid that follows the logo's logic, and Thonik said the system lets everyone engage with the art regardless of location.
Why it lands
The building's slanted walls were the most recognisable thing about it.
A font release with slanted glyphs solved a problem the first A's had.
A palette that changes with each exhibition keeps the system fresh.
What you can take
An identity that borrows its main shape from the building is hard to confuse with another museum.
Since then
The article records only the launch of the identity.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE