Archaeological Museum in Zagreb

The Archaeological Museum in Zagreb is the oldest museum institution in the Croatian capital, founded in 1836. Today the museum’s collections hold more than 450,000 varied artifacts and monuments, covering the period from the prehistoric to the medieval ages.

Faced with the problem of an inconsistent visual identity, they hired our studio to help with the museum’s rebranding and the development of a contemporary identity that would fit their need for implementing consistent visuals in a vast amount of applications — from stationery, publications, signs, marketing, and museum shop material to a strict set of layout guidelines for online and printed material for exhibitions and other events (lectures, book promotions, concerts, workshops).

Along with the particular problem of the frequent use of extremely long and complicated exhibition titles (sub-titles and sub-sub-titles) — as required by the scientific nature of these events — plus the occasional lack of decent illustrational material, one of the main obstacles was the fact that many of these applications are not designed in-house, so the guidelines had to be kept precise, simple, and clear as possible to allow the consistency of visuals and retain control of the identity specifics.

Our response was a bold but stylistically neutral typographic framework complemented by the use of selected background images whose character defines the tone of the theme and illustrates the time period of the particular visual.

The typefaces used are Galaxie Polaris (for the main information, titles and signs) and Vista Sans (for body text).