pratibharaman616@gmail.com

Museum of African Diaspora | Brand Identity

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator

MoAD billboard expansion

BACKGROUND: The MoAD is a contemporary art museum whose mission is to celebrate Black cultures, ignite challenging conversations, and inspire learning through the global lens of the African diaspora.

DESIGN PROBLEM: Update MoAD’s brand identity to reflect four main tenants of origin, movement, adaptation, and transformation.

TARGET AUDIENCE: 25-45 year olds who are socially conscious, culturally engaged, often urban, with a high interest in identity and global history.

Postcard and billboard expansion

DESIGN PROCESS: While the current brand identity for MoAD is effective in its minimalism, I wanted to explore a direction that incorporated bright colors and symbology. I started by creating a moodboard aligned to my vision for this new identity, and from there, worked on redesigning the logo, creating a color palette, and expanding into secondary materials.

For logo ideation, I first jotted down a series of quick sketches, and then rendered the ones that worked best into Adobe Illustrator. I found that eye/sun imagery most aligned with my vision, symbolizing ongoing cycles and new beginnings, both of which are important to diaspora struggle.

I then came across the Adinkra symbol collection, which originated in Ghana during the 1700s to represent concepts and proverbs for nature and philosophies of life. Over time, through colonization and slave trade, these symbols traveled the globe, coming to symbolize aspects of the diaspora experience as well. While I initially designed the logo with a sun/eye as the ‘O’, I felt the Adinkra spider web symbol for creativity was a better match.

Pinterest moodboard

LOGO IDEATION

1st iteration

2nd iteration

3rd iteration

DESIGN SOLUTION: Overall, I chose six icons to represent the museum - spider’s web for creativity, a comb to represent community and heritage, fern for resilience in times of hardship, an eye for remembrance, a Sankofa for origin, and the Nkyinkyim to show the adaptability of diaspora and creative transformation of culture. I uploaded these icons to Illustrator, using Image Trace to further edit so they would align with my vision for the brand’s imagery. I wanted all the icons to be organic and free-flowing, so they would serve as a contrast to the sharp lines of the main logo.

Together, these icons work alongside a color palette made of deep browns and yellows, accented by shades of bright red, green, and blue, all of which I pulled from the moodboard and which I felt could accurately represent the variation in experience across diaspora cultures.

For typefaces, I used ‘Aktiv Grotesk’ for the logo, ‘Panel Sans Mono’ for titles and headers, and ‘Degular Variable’ for body copy.

Sankofa

Abode Santann

Duafe

Nkyinkyim

Ananse Ntentan

Aya

COLOR PALETTE

TYPEFACES

Title and Subheads
Panel Sans Mono

Upper Case ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Lower Case abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Symbols ÂÊÔăâêô
Numbers 1234567890
Punctuation and More ‘?’“!”(%)[#]{@}/&\<-+÷×=>

Body
Degular Variable

Upper Case ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Lower Case abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Symbols ÂÊÔăâêô
Numbers 1234567890
Punctuation and More ‘?’“!”(%)[#]{@}/&\<-+÷×=>

EXPANSIONS

Adinkra sticker mockup

Adinkra tote bag mockup

Business card mockup

WEBSITE EXPANSION