Pentagram's Michael Bierut creates striking flexible MIT Media Lab identity

Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and designer Aron Fay have designed a new identity for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, creating this striking, labyrinth-like look that brilliantly communicates the faculty’s “anti-disciplinary” approach.

The MIT Media Lab comprises graphic designers, scientists and engineers, and has worked across areas including wearable computing, digitally-focussed treatments for neurological disorders and a “stackable, electric car for sustainable cities”; and the new-look shifts shape to take a slightly different form to denote each of the faculty’s 23 research groups.

The new designs draw on Richard The’s 2011 identity, which marked MIT Media Lab’s 25th birthday – a colourful creation designed with Roon Kang around an algorithmic system that was capable of creating more than 40,000 different permutations. Michael and Aron took these ideas and the flexibility they represented, and combined them with the simplicity of the 1962 Muriel Cooper MIT Press logo, which is formed of seven vertical white lines on black.

Pentagram’s identity is based on a grid system than can be pulled apart and put back together every which way to form numerous individual glyphs for different faculties and applications in one beautiful, cohesive look, bound together by a single ML monogram in Helvetica that acts as the Media Lab’s logo.