Brand Identity
Seattle Asian
Art Museum
Overview
A full brand identity for the Seattle Asian Art Museum, built to give it its own voice after decades in the shadow of its parent, the Seattle Art Museum.
Deliverables
Process
Brand Discovery
Synthesized three tonal territories into one organizing idea: a window into Asian art.
Graphic System
Built the system from one gesture, the oval window taken from the lettermark, and extended it into the motif, the enlarged mark, and a seal pattern at every scale.
Photography
Made restraint the rule: full color for artwork only, black and white for everything else.
Background
Problem
SAAM had no visual presence of its own. Every touchpoint deferred to the SAM umbrella, which left its collection and its place in Seattle's Asian and Asian American community anonymous. The job wasn't to make SAAM look refined. It was to make it read as its own institution, with a mark and system that hold up at any scale, from a nametag to a transit wrap, without SAM to lean on.
Solution
One idea runs through it: a window into Asian art. It came from the counter of the lowercase "a" in the lettermark, an oval that became the brand's main gesture, framing the artwork and pulling the viewer in. Everything else follows from it: the repeating oval, the enlarged lettermark, a seal pattern, and a tight palette with brand orange (Pantone 1665 C) as the only signal. The art stays the priority.
Research & Audience
Primary audience: art lovers, Asian and Asian American communities, families, students, locals, and tourists. Secondary: K-12 educators, researchers, and local artists. The thread is a visitor who comes to engage, not just look, and who might come back, join, and carry the museum with them.
Competitive analysis put SAAM's opening between local and community-focused on one axis and traditional and contemporary on the other, a space no regional museum fully held. The useful finding: SAAM hangs its collection by concept (spirituality, nature, the cycle of life) rather than by date, and that curatorial logic was already doing the work the brand needed to do, layered and built for depth.
Project Details
Client: Seattle Asian Art Museum (self-directed class brief)
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, Photoshop, Canon 5D
Skills: Brand strategy, identity systems, environmental design, photography
Role: Collaborative with Morgan Doetze. Logo design, digital touchpoints, brand guidelines
Timeline: 5 weeks, Winter 2026. About 110 hours
The system holds together because every decision traces to the same source. The oval isn't decoration. It's the argument: there's always more just past the surface.