Welcome to CAM: A New Brand for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

We’ve been working behind the scenes for the past six months or so to help polish up one of St. Louis’ great cultural assets: the Contemporary Art Museum. The Contemporary team expressed that their brand, as expressed in logo, website, collateral, and even building, had “gone gray”. It felt, they said, too boring, too quiet, too aloof when they wanted to feel engaged with the public, spirited, bright and new.

We realized that the old logo was part of the challenge — a single line of elegantly letter-spaced Univers set without breaks. And it’s sandblasted into the concrete exterior of the building and windows, so it’s going to be an essential part of the Museum for decades to come… no rebranding can ever move forward without acknowledging this original logo in some way.

We broke that logo into a more readable, more usable stack of words, setting them left and right off of a common vertical axis. We also did research and found that only two other museums of contemporary art went by the CAM abbreviation, and neither was geographically proximate. A new consumer-friendly appellation and logo were soon born, now riding on top of that stack of words (see the black tote bag in the image above).

Since then we’ve reimagined the newsletter (top left), posters, mailers, exterior and interior signage, branded merchandise, and built a completely new content-managed website on our proprietary Eero™ CMS. The site went live 1-11-11, and the rest is rolling out this week in advance of the Museum’s opening this Friday night. Come celebrate the new brand with us at CAM!