Brand Identity
Seattle Asian
Art Museum
Overview
A brand identity for the Seattle Asian Art Museum, built so it stops looking like a wing of the Seattle Art Museum and starts looking like a museum.
The whole system comes from the counter of the lowercase a in the lettermark. That oval became the repeating motif, the enlarged mark, and the seal pattern, so nothing had to be invented twice.
Photography follows one rule: full colour for artwork, black and white for everything else. Writing it as a rule rather than a preference meant it held without art direction on every asset.
Background Read more Close
Problem
SAAM sits in Volunteer Park with one of the strongest Asian art collections in the country. It also had no identity of its own.
The brief said visual refresh, which was never going to fix it. Nothing SAAM produced looked like it came from SAAM. Every sign and every email pointed somewhere else, so a serious collection, in a city with a large Asian and Asian American community, read as somebody’s department.
A tidier sub-brand would have satisfied the brief and changed nothing. The mark needed to hold with no parent logo beside it, at nametag size and at streetcar size.
Research & Audience
Who it is for: Asian and Asian American communities in Seattle, plus the families, students, and locals who turn up to actually engage with the work. Educators, researchers, and local artists sit behind them.
Competitive mapping put SAAM in a spot no other regional museum occupied, local and community-focused on one axis, traditional and contemporary on the other. The finding I actually used came from the curators though. SAAM hangs its collection by concept, spirituality, nature, the cycle of life, not by date or region. That is already what a brand is supposed to do, so I followed the curation instead of inventing a second structure beside it.
Building the System
The audit gave me three tonal territories and all three kept pointing at the same idea: a window into Asian art. It came out of the counter of the lowercase a in the lettermark, an oval that ends up framing the artwork everywhere it appears.
Once it existed I did not have to invent much. The repeating oval, the enlarged mark, the seal pattern, and a palette pinned to brand orange (Pantone 1665 C) all come from the same drawing. Brand orange does all the signalling, so full colour belongs to the art. Photography got a rule instead of a preference: full colour for artwork, black and white for everything else.
One oval, drawn once, does every job in the system.
Seattle Asian Art Museum. Self-directed brief.
Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, Photoshop, Canon 5D.
Brand strategy, identity systems, environmental design, photography.
Collaborative with Morgan Doetze. Logo design, digital touchpoints, and brand guidelines by Will Charley.
5 weeks, Winter 2026. Around 110 hours.