APFEL rebrands Lisbon’s new Centro de Arte Moderna

A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL) has created a new identity for Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM), inspired by the museum’s new building.

The London studio’s new look and feel was rolled out across print and digital touchpoints including a new website, relaunch campaign, merchandise and exhibition graphics.

It centres around an elegant marque which took visual cues from the both museum’s new programme and its striking new building, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. He worked closely with landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic to create a space that integrates the museum with its gardens, its architecture with nature.

“The curved, canopy-like forms of Kuma’s building were something that we were keen to bring into the new identity from our very first sketches – the movement, fluidity, elegance and connection to the concept and form of the new CAM seemed really important to communicate,” says APFEL’s co-founder, Emma Thomas.

Both the architecture and the typographic design are inspired by the concept of engawa, which Thomas explains is, “an architectural principle typical of Japanese buildings which strives to create a diffusion between internal and external space.”

She says, “This engawa shape emerges in the letter A of CAM in the marque, and the curves are also echoed in the other letterforms and work well alongside Futura, the Gulbenkian’s house typeface.”

The continued use of Futura, and the existing Calouste Gulbenkian logo, presented a challenge for the APFEL team, who had to capture and communicate “the museum’s new and invigorated agenda” alongside these heritage assets.

Interestingly, the designers were involved in conversations that went beyond the creative work, taking part in workshops with the CAM team to discuss how the museum can engage new audiences in Lisbon, Portugal, and the wider world.

Key decisions

Using the letter A to echo the architecture

“Even within our initial sketches, we were really keen to bring the curved gesture of the engawa roof into the logotype’s form and it was the letter A in CAM that felt most natural for this,” Thomas says. “We wanted the new CAM identity to be recognisable and connect directly to this new, iconic space for Lisbon.”

Putting motion at the heart of the new identity

From the start, the APFEL team considered how the new brand would work in an animated, as well as static, form. “The gestural quality of the identity marque lends itself to animation and we wanted to play into this for the museum’s campaigns,” Thomas says.

The new marque has been developed as an animated graphic, “emerging as if written across a range of identity assets as a reminder of CAM’s fluid, youthful and dynamic agenda.”

Embracing playfulness

“The linear quality of the marque gives it a large degree of flexibility: it works well alongside Futura; it is light enough to be used at a large scale in a lock-up with the Calouste Calouste Gulbenkian; and it can be overlaid on both text and image without compromising legibility,” Thomas explains.

You can see that in full force across CAM’s new comms, she says, “where large letter forms are imposed over smaller text, imbuing a sense of liveliness.”