An identity redesign for a Seattle institution that holds 130 aircraft and 60 years of aviation history.
Client · The Museum of Flight · Seattle
Nico Zhang · HCDE 308 · June 2026
Continue01 · Brand overview
The Museum of Flight is the largest independent non-profit air and space museum in the world, founded in 1965 at Boeing Field, and the scale of what it holds is part of what the identity has to carry. There are more than 130 aircraft and spacecraft, tens of thousands of artifacts, and a collection that runs from early gliders through jet-age commercial aviation to the Space Shuttle program, alongside the personal histories of the pilots, engineers, and astronauts who are harder to put on a wall but matter just as much.
Audience
Families and visitors
Audience
Aviation enthusiasts
Audience
Students and educators
Audience
Donors, partners, and civic audiences
02 · Brand attributes
ATR.01
A sense of ascent and movement, the feeling that something is about to leave the ground.
ATR.02
Institutional clarity for the archives, the education work, and the stewardship the museum is responsible for.
ATR.03
Open enough for families and first-time visitors without ever talking down to anyone.
ATR.04
A system that can live in digital and physical contexts at once, without looking like it is chasing either.
03 · Visual context
Aviation museums
Most of them lean on heritage, large-scale photography, and dense interpretive panels, and the register ends up respectful and slightly archival, which reads as serious but rarely as alive.
Science centers
These go bright and primary-colored and family-first, often loud in the way they compete for the attention of children and school groups, which works for them but would pull this museum toward a younger register than it wants.
Airlines and aerospace
Here the language is sky-blue gradients, motion blur, and glossy metallic finishes, tuned for selling tickets and signaling trust, with very little room left for an institutional voice.
The goal that comes out of this is to keep the lift and motion of flight while making the system read as more editorial and more like a museum, through EB Garamond, generous white space, and color used with restraint rather than for effect.
04 · Design intent
Wonder without forcing spectacle.
Heritage without feeling old or distant.
A mark that survives small size, monochrome, signage, print, merchandise, and motion.
05 · Design philosophy
Wonder is the easiest of the three to name and the hardest to actually design for, because the moment an identity tries to perform awe it usually undercuts it. What I keep coming back to is that the artifacts and the hangars already carry the feeling, and the system mostly has to not get in their way.
The museum holds aircraft, engineering, stories, and the people behind them, which is a heavier kind of history than most brands have to account for. The identity has to respect that without letting it tip into something old or distant, and most of that work happens in restraint rather than in obvious references to the past.
The system has to hold up across signage, web, print, and merchandise, which means the mark has to survive small, monochrome, and in motion before it earns the right to become elaborate. That order matters to me, the constraints first and the flourishes only after, because a mark that only works large and full color has not really been designed yet.
06 · Moodboard
07 · Identity system
Three aerodynamic shapes, the aircraft, the wing movement, and the takeoff, set against the wordmark in EB Garamond Bold. The mark is sized to read at embroidery scale first and to survive at building signage scale second, because the small end is where most marks quietly fail.
Palette
Primary
#0141C9
RGB 01 · 65 · 201
Secondary
#49A7F7
RGB 73 · 167 · 247
Neutral
#D1D1D1
RGB 209 · 209 · 209
Accent
#FF510A
RGB 255 · 81 · 10
The accent is a warm counter to the institutional blue, not a fourth brand color. It marks the small orientation cues: the section indices, today's date, the keyboard focus, and the ADMIT ONE grant on a ticket. It appears only as a small graphic mark, never as body text. Everywhere else, color stays restrained.
Type
Wordmark · EB Garamond Bold
The Museum of Flight
Editorial · EB Garamond Italic
Open daily, ten to five.
Body · EB Garamond Regular
General admission, exhibits, and experiences for one day of your choosing.
Identity system · decisions
Each choice is made for the system, not one artifact, written as the decision, the reasoning behind it, and how it carries to artifacts this project never built.
One mark, scaled only by enlargement
The three shapes hold their relationship only while the proportions stay fixed, and squashing the lockup collapses the takeoff motion almost immediately.
Across future artifactsthe same mark survives a 12 mm embroidered pin, a printed banner, and a hangar sign meters wide, and distortion is never the lever.
One typeface family
EB Garamond carries institutional weight and editorial register at once, so the system never has to reach for a second face.
Across future artifactssignage, app UI, print, and email shift weight and style but add no typeface, keeping the system recognizable far from this prototype.
Blue, deliberately held back
The moment the secondary blue spreads past hover, focus, and the member-pass status pill, the identity starts to read as an airline rather than a museum.
Across future artifactsevery future surface inherits the same restraint, which is most of what keeps the system in the museum category.
Orange marks the one thing to notice
A warm accent marks orientation, where you are and what is current, which is work the blue cannot do at contrast.
Across future artifactssection indices, today, and keyboard focus on screen extend to the admission grant on a ticket and to entry and exit markers on signage, always as a small graphic mark.
Color scaled to durability
An artifact read once and discarded earns less color than one that is kept and reused.
Across future artifactsa temporary placard stays primary-only, while a member pass or an architectural sign that persists may carry more.
Editorial over technical
Between the editorial and the brutalist directions, the editorial one stays quiet enough for the aircraft to lead.
Across future artifactsnarrative contexts get restraint, while data-dense contexts (a manifest, a schedule) earn more color distinction. That is a rule, not a one-off.
A shared layout vocabulary
Hairline rules, tracked-caps labels, calendar-style date grids, and hatched unavailable states are defined components, not one screen's styling.
Across future artifactsan email header, a merchandise tag, or a wayfinding divider all draw from the same set, so any new artifact reads as part of the identity on sight.
08 · Digital artifact
This artifact is a working SvelteKit prototype of the museum's ticket purchase flow, built and skinned in the chosen identity rather than mocked up as a static screen. It carries the system through four states on a single screen, the default empty state, the ticket-populated state, the closed-day disabled state, and the secure-checkout chrome, with animated transitions across the calendar, the ticket stepper, the order summary, and the add-on cards.
Working in motion turned out to be the harder test of the identity, harder than any still composition, because every transition is another place the system can fall apart. Inter has been replaced with EB Garamond, the navy CTA has shifted to #0141C9, the bone ground is now white, and the old MoF lettermark has been replaced with the new combination mark. The layout vocabulary stays from the previous iteration, the hairline rules, the tracked-caps labels, the hatched closed-day cells, the sticky order summary, so the change reads as a refinement rather than a rebuild.
Two directions, one rule
Before the editorial flow I built a second, brutalist manifest direction on the same data. It carried more color distinction between elements, which suited a dense control panel but pulled the museum toward an engineering tool. The editorial direction won because it stays quiet enough for the aircraft to lead, and the choice became a system rule: narrative contexts get restraint, data-dense contexts earn more color distinction, the same logic that later kept the orange accent on wayfinding alone.
09 · Analog artifact
The printed admission ticket and the member guest pass are the analog companion to the digital flow, the physical thing a visitor actually receives at the gate. Both carry the same vocabulary as the prototype, the hairline rules between sections, the tracked-caps labels, the calendar-style date treatment, so the visit holds together from the moment of purchase to the moment of entry.
The two designs test the system at two different scales of attention, since the general admission ticket is read once at entry and discarded while the member pass is kept and reused for a year. Both run on the same lockup and the same type system, and the only real divergence is one of attention, not color: both carry the warm accent on a single status mark, the ticket on its ADMIT ONE grant and the pass on its ACTIVE pill, while everything else stays the institutional blue.
10 · What the system held
The combination mark holds at both small embroidered scales and large signage as long as the three-shape geometry stays intact, which was the part I was least sure about going in. Squashing it horizontally collapses the takeoff motion almost immediately, and holding the proportions is what keeps the read, so the constraint turned out to be less about size than about never distorting the relationship between the shapes.
EB Garamond carries the institutional weight of the wordmark and the editorial register of the body copy at the same time, which is what lets a single family run the entire system, from the wordmark down through headlines, captions, ticket fields, and footer text. I kept expecting to need a second typeface somewhere and never actually did, which I am reading as a sign the system is more coherent than I assumed at the start.
Restraint on the secondary blue is most of what keeps the system reading as a museum rather than an airline, which is a thinner line than I expected. The moment that blue shows up anywhere past active states and the single status pill on the member pass, the whole thing slides toward a category I spent the project trying to stay out of, and I am still not sure the boundary holds at every scale. The one color I added past the blue and the red alert states is a single warm accent, kept to wayfinding, marking the section indices, today, and the keyboard-focus position, so it reads as the restraint extended rather than abandoned, doing work the blue could not do safely, since the old blue focus ring never cleared contrast.
11 · What is still open
The mobile version of the Buy Tickets prototype has not been built yet, and that is the gap I am least comfortable leaving, since most people who buy a ticket will do it on a phone. The production print specs for ticket stock and perforation still need to be drafted, and the system has not been tested on signage at architectural scale, where the three-shape geometry will have to be re-evaluated at distances measured in tens of meters rather than tens of centimeters. I do not yet know whether the mark that survives embroidery also survives being read from across a hangar, and that is the question I would want to answer next.
Appendix
A.01 · Process
The moodboard, the generated logo prototypes, and the rounds the combination mark went through before it settled are kept in the project Figma board. Each round narrowed toward geometry that holds at small embroidered scales without losing the sense of lift.
Open the moodboard & logo iterations in FigmaA.02 · AI disclosure
All design judgment and decisions were made by humans (Nico Zhang and David Han), and every AI output was reviewed, approved, or redirected before it entered the work. AI was used in three roles:
A.03 · Team contributions
David Han is credited with the combination mark (the three aerodynamic shapes) and with the shared brand work that preceded this case study, and my contribution to the logo was the wordmark and its typography. The identity system, the color and layout decisions, and the digital and analog artifacts shown here are my own work.
A.04 · Class feedback
For the Tuesday critique I presented two ticket-page directions: a minimal, editorial design and a brutalist airplane-manifest page. The room liked the extended use of color in the brutalist version but valued the professionalism of the minimal one. Holding both is what led to the fourth color, a single contrasting accent (#FF510A) added to the editorial system so it carries a little of the brutalist color life without giving up its restraint.
A.05 · Sources & references
Reference materials behind the research, moodboard, and type system.