FRANCESCA VIOLICH KENNEDY

In July 2018, Boston's ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) debuted a new visual identity. I challenged myself to design one that I thought would fit the ICA, one of my favorite Boston-area museums.

To me, the fundamental qualities that set apart the ICA from other contemporary art museums are its

• dynamism

• vitality

• community

• eccentricity

I was interested in making logo very graphic, almost a piece of contemporary art in itself, and in making a logo that worked both vertically and horizontally, and that, like contemporary art, invited users to see it in many ways. 

I wanted to stress the integration of the three letters, fused into a single and almost pictographic shape. The vaguely anthropomorphic nature of the final glyph (especially when vertical, as seen on the left) highlighted the human aspect of the museum and provided an additional layer to the three letters. 

The decision to make the letters black and white was two-part: firstly, the high contrast emphasized the separation between the "C" and "A", something which was a struggle in earlier ideations (i.e. preventing the glyph from reading like 10A or IOA); and secondly I liked the idea of the contemporary art remaining constant against a changing background. I envisioned somewhere in the museum the logo-glyph on a screen with changing light behind it, to emphasize how the logo (and by proxy the art) takes on new meanings and shades with different tones. I chose the four primary background shades from a more modern take on the major secondary colors (magenta, cyan, and yellow).