Little Troop’s playfully peculiar identity for MoMA’s family festival characterises childhood imagination
A match made in heaven, the world-renowned art gallery collaborates with its NYC neighbour to shape it’s first-ever family festival.
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Another World is the new five-day family festival which sees New York’s MoMa taken over in the name of creativity and nature. In a match made in heaven, the design studio Little Troop were tasked with developing the festival’s visual identity and wide-reaching campaign. Given a fairly loose brief, alongside the potential that the project’s enormity of applications offered – from café placemats and merchandise to billboards – Little Troop took the opportunity to explore the identity’s themes through their perspectives as parents whilst also listening to their own inner child.
“We came up with a set of bold, graphic, otherworldly characters representing lifeforms of all kinds,” Noemie Le Coz, Little Troop’s co-founder says, with each character carefully designed to embody the fun of the festival, as well as the combination of creativity and inclusivity. “The final set of characters are a true motley of creatures,” she adds, each alluding to all sorts of organisms, “from flower-like plant life with shocked faces and ever-changing leaves, to purple baby frogs with parents that pop up from portals, all are deliberately a little dream-like.” Also important was the sense of playful peculiarity throughout. “Bringing in a sense of playfulness was crucial,” Noemie adds, “a big part of the festival’s purpose was to inspire kids to imagine their own natural worlds through play.”
What Little Troop’s characters demonstrate is the restraint necessary in designing for children whilst relying purely on illustration. Given the identity’s need to sell the festival without requiring photography, Noemie explains the necessity of simplicity and, at times, austerity in balancing the tone. “It had to avoid overly-cute smiling in place of wide-eyed wonder, and adopting rudimentary animation that felt understated in tone, rather than childish,” she says.
The imagination that Little Troop distilled in their characters was likewise channelled into the studio’s choice of colour, working within MoMA’s existing guidelines, they opted for seven out of the brand’s twelve colours. “We selected them to balance timelessness, gender neutrality, fun, and appeal to both kids and their parents, we always love a pop of pink, and the palette’s pastel peach brought in the perfect amount to hit this balance,” Noemie says. “The bright red also brought in an iconic, classic boldness,” she adds, the colour providing a familiar yet powerfully robust colour for the nature-inspired greens and blues to bounce off. Similarly, the typographic restraints of MoMA’s guidelines offered a solid base for the identity to flourish upon, visually in sync with the acquaintance and impact of MoMA Sans – the brand’s hero typeface – without comprising its own design. “We made sure that the illustration and animation felt bold enough to maintain a strong presence,” Noemie says.
“It was incredibly surreal,” Noemie says, speaking to the feeling of seeing everything for the first time IRL. “We freaked out when we got targeted with the first Instagram ad for it.” She and co-founder Jeremy Elliot were thrilled by the feeling of walking through MoMA with parents and their children engaging with the world. “There were strollers with the character stickers stuck to them,” Noemie ends, “watching our three-year-old, Luca, colour in the cafeteria placemats we’d designed was pretty special.”