Thursday, February 18, 2016

Goodbye, “M”

First the Metropolitan Museum of Art ended the use of the “M” admission button, and now it’s doing away with the “M” altogether, a beautiful and art-historical “M.” Justin Davidson calls the Museum’s new logo “a typographic bus crash.” I agree. And I’d add that there won’t be another bus coming along any time soon.

Elaine, when I just showed her the new logo: “Ew.”

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for passing on news of the new (ew) design.

[It’s really spelled ew, not eww . Who knew?]

comments: 7

Berit said...

I clicked your link, saw how they'd kerned/worked "the"; thought "Yeah, alright. I can deal."

Then my eyes dropped, "EW!"

It really IS a bus crash in that one watches it occur upon the page. The mirror recursion off the "T"s has the eye swooping around to give the impression that it reads, "THET MET". The drunkenness of "MET" 's E! The "M" an old war amputee or grotesque Frankenstein with not quite all his parts in all the right places.

Michael Leddy said...

The more I look, the more I see thorns and a vague suggestion of Edward Gorey. (I like EG, but he’s not what ’s needed here.)

How did this design ever get approved?!

Frex said...

My museum has rebranded too:
the Minneapolis Institute of Art is no longer "the MIA" (the M- I-A), it's "Mia", pronounced like Mia Farrow.
Why this is an improvement, and one worth spending a lot of money on, I truly have no idea. (Because I didn't read the brochure.)

Have you seen the BBC comedy, "W1A" (postcode)? --about the BBC?
Its Marketing manager, Siobhan Sharpe (Jessica Hyde), is both funny and scary, she's so ridiculous...and powerful. Her ideas, such as to change Wimbledon to WIN-bledon, are all too believable.

Michael Leddy said...

At least the Art Institute of Chicago can’t make that kind of change. Visit Aic? The Ache?

I just saw watched a YouTube clip of W1A — I’d never heard of it before. It seems very Office-like (I mean the British Office , the only one I’ve seen). How do you get to see this show?

Frex said...

I watched W1A streaming on Netflix.
It's a follow-up to Twenty Twelve, about the same sort of bureaucratic humbug (& some of the same staff) behind the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

There's an Australian version now (on Netflix) called Dreamland:
episode one is about changing the organization's logo! (Must be in the air.)

And, yep, they're all in that mockumentary style that the British "Office" popularized.
Or was it the Spaghetti Tree "documentary" that did that? :)

Slywy said...

I saw this in one of your posts you referenced. "The buttons were introduced a year after the Met instituted a suggested-price admission system, replacing paper tickets and stickpins, and they seemed to capture the spirit of the new admissions policy, acting as a souvenir instead of a receipt." Yes. That's the kind of souvenir I tend to treasure.

New logo: I see a uterus or a scorpion, depending on how I squint. It's a waste of my aging eyesight.

Michael Leddy said...

Fresca, I remember the spaghetti harvest.

Diane, I’ve tried to see both in the new logo, but I can’t. I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. :)