What it had to solve
The Toledo Museum of Art had been a cultural icon for over 120 years, but its logo and visual identity had not been updated since the late 1990s. It needed to feel inviting to Toledo's diverse population and alive on digital media without discarding the pride the city already took in it.
The idea
Repurpose the museum's own architecture into a multifaceted letter T: a dynamic mark that reframes art history, with an adaptive palette and Glass City glass cues.
How it works
Lafayette American and Semi:Formal built the rebrand on the platform "the transformative power of art is for all of Toledo." They turned the letter T — a point of civic pride that also echoes the museum's structure — into a dynamic, multifaceted icon, paired it with an adaptive color palette, and wove visual elements evoking glass throughout, from on-campus signage to the online destination that launched in mid-2023.
What it did
The identity earned a D&AD Yellow Pencil in Branding in 2024 and a Merit in Brand Identity/Rebranding at The One Show 2024. Museum brand director Gary Gonya called it a brand ready to claim leadership.
Background
The Toledo Museum of Art is 120-plus years old and one of the anchors of a city nicknamed the Glass City, yet its visual identity had stood still since the late 1990s. Brand strategy director Gary Gonya's brief was twofold: make the museum more inviting and accessible to Toledo's diverse population, and make the brand feel vibrant and alive on digital media, where flat repetition of an old logo was not working.
Detroit agency Lafayette American, with design studio Semi:Formal, answered with a system rather than a logo. Its platform, "the transformative power of art is for all of Toledo," produced a dynamic, multifaceted icon built from the letter T — Toledo's initial, a civic point of pride, and an echo of the museum's own structure — so the mark itself could keep reframing art history. An adaptive color palette and visual elements evoking glass tied the system to place, and the redesign ran from on-campus applications to a new online destination launched in mid-2023.
The work was recognized across both major Anglo-American design juries in the same season: a D&AD Yellow Pencil in Branding in 2024 and a Merit in Brand Identity/Rebranding at The One Show 2024. Gonya framed the result as a 120-year-old institution evolving into "a brand that's ready for what's next, a brand that can claim to be a leader."
Why it lands
The identity was built from assets the city already loved — the letter T and the Glass City glass heritage — so change read as continuity instead of erasure.
A dynamic logo system and adaptive palette let one mark flex across signage, web and campaigns, answering the brief's digital-vitality problem structurally rather than cosmetically.
The strategic platform put accessibility and inclusion in the brief itself, aligning trustees, staff and designers on who the rebrand was for.
Pairing a brand agency with a design studio let strategy, identity craft and digital execution ship together in one launch.
What you can take
A legacy institution rebrands best when the new mark is found inside the old one: building the identity from the city's own letter, building and industry turned change into continuity.
Since then
The rebrand launched in mid-2023, first supporting the Matt Wedel: Phenomenal Debris exhibition, then rolled across the museum's campus and digital presence. In 2024 it picked up back-to-back recognition from D&AD and The One Show, and Lafayette American has continued to build on the relationship as the museum's long-term brand partner.
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