Atlas creates beautiful identity for new Barcelona Design Museum

Pitching for a design museum identity that will act as the platform for some of the most celebrated designers the world over can’t be an easy task. How to merge tradition and modernity? To create something beautiful, that doesn’t detract from the work itself? So when Mallorcan agency Atlas put forward their proposals for the new Barcelona Design Museum’s identity, it’s perhaps little surprise they worried their ideas were “too modern and risky.”

However, the risk paid off. Atlas – the pair behind the Elephant Magazine redesign we featured last month – won the pitch, and now its stunning designs are used across both the museum and Barcelona’s Design Hub, which houses the museum and the city’s major design associations.

The look and feel is crisp and bold, and is based around the idea of a “connecting line” to represented the “unique geographic location of the building,” Atlas explains. This line is carried through both 2D and 3D applications, which were developed alongside the museum designers NUG Architects. The line device works together beautifully with a simple typographic approach to make the tricky task of uniting multiple design-led organisations under one system look utterly effortless.