Gretel rebuilds the Philadelphia Art Museum brand around Philly's own voice (interview)

Rebrand one of America's largest and most beloved cultural institutions to attract new audiences without diminishing the institutional authority that its collection, programming and scholarship confer.

Come down the Rocky Steps and open the doors: build the identity from Philly's corner-store vernacular and make 'Philadelphia Art Museum' the official name.

Gretel traced the griffin logo's genealogy from the original 1938 version and redrew it in a 'tool and die' style legible from 16 pixels to 30 feet; type designer Ryan Bugden built the custom Fairmount Serif on Sol Hess's 1933 Hess Neobold; the wordmark equalises type sizes so 'Philadelphia' gets top billing; and the informal name became official. Gone Fishing and Self Aware built the digital experience under Gretel's 'orbits' design architecture.

Self-reported in the interview: the launch became a citywide cultural event drawing the passionate positive and negative feedback the museum anticipated; no third-party metrics are given.

In a paired interview with The Brand Identity (published 17 December 2025), Brooklyn studio Gretel and the Philadelphia Museum of Art recount their 2024–2025 rebrand. The museum wanted a fundamental shift in how it exists in the world; the brief's metaphor — 'coming down the steps and throwing the doors wide open' — nods to the Rocky Steps, more famous globally than the museum itself. Gretel won an RFP sent to over 40 agencies, on the strength of strategic rigour shown in prior work for RISD.

The chosen direction, most local of three, drew on corner stores, street vendors and murals rather than museum aesthetics. Museum head of design Luis Bravo first worried how the curators would react, but research showed Philadelphia's visual diversity was identity, not chaos — echoing type designer Sol Hess, whose Hess Neobold (1933) became the basis for Gretel's custom Fairmount Serif. Hess, the interview notes, was born, lived, worked and died in Philadelphia, studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, and succeeded Frederic Goudy at Lanston Monotype.

The museum's sacred seven-decade griffin logo was redrawn in a 'tool and die' style. Gretel explored the full spectrum, from a faithful restoration of the 1938 original to an over-minimal machined version, and landed in the middle: every line drawn for symbolic meaning and functional performance, legible from 16 pixels on a phone to 30 feet on the facade. Motion graphics, per Bravo, were what made the modernised mark feel right.

The partnership also made the museum's informal name official — 'Philadelphia Art Museum' rather than 'Philadelphia Museum of Art' — a question revisited since Pentagram's 2015 rebrand and settled by equalising wordmark sizes so 'Philadelphia' gets top billing. Head of strategy Kasia Galla says the rationale mapped to the museum's vision: 'more engaging, more expansive, more future-focused and more Philly.' By the interview's publication the launch had become a citywide cultural event, with the passionate feedback — positive and negative — the museum had anticipated.

A beloved institution could only change with its city, not at it: the vernacular direction was chosen precisely because it felt 'unapologetically Philly'.

Research reframed Philadelphia's eclectic visual culture from chaos into identity, giving curators a reason to accept corner-store aesthetics.

Rediscovering Sol Hess — a local legend trained at the museum's own school — let the typeface carry the heritage-meets-industry argument by itself.

Making the way people actually speak ('I'm going to the Art Museum') the official name is accessibility enacted, not just preached.

The 'orbits' architecture let multiple teams work in parallel — core stable, outer layers adaptive — without the system fragmenting.

Institutional change lands when the local voice leads — weeks of research into what a city already looks and sounds like gave a 150-year-old museum permission to loosen up.

The identity launched with Gretel on strategy and core identity, Gone Fishing and Self Aware on digital, and the museum's own team on rollout; the interview reports passionate public feedback and no third-party metrics. The griffin's motion behaviour, per the museum, was what made the modernised mark feel right.