Big Blocks in Cow Town

The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History was originally founded as a children’s museum by a group of women in the rough-and-tumble, and mostly male dominated, “Cow Town” of Fort Worth, Texas in 1941. Over the years the museum was literally “loved to death” by visitors and it eventually became time to build a new one. Located in the architecturally rich Fort Worth Cultural District, the museum chose the famous Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta and his son Victor to design its new space. Legorreta is known for his playful geometric designs and his use of a distinctive Mexican-influenced color palette.

DJ Stout has created a fresh brand identity for the new Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that opens this fall. The identity gets its inspiration from Legorreta’s reoccurring use of the square as a design motif and his application of rich, bright colors in the design of the new building.

Stout and his team in Austin developed a logo consisting of three squares representing the letters F, W, and M (Fort Worth Museum) and an entire alphabet of Legorreta-inspired letterforms. The square letterforms can be stacked and rearranged like a child’s set of alphabet blocks. These symbolic “building blocks of knowledge” are a metaphor for the museum’s early roots as a children’s museum and its commitment to families and learning. “This place is different from the other museums in the Cultural District,” says Stout. “It’s fun, fun, fun. I wanted the identity to reflect its playful, childlike sense of discovery.”

The identity was inspired by Legorreta’s architecture for the museum’s new building.

The square motif shows up in other components of the new identity system, including a pattern based on a lattice of squares called “The Skeleton,” a distinctive graphic rendering technique created by reversing a grid of squares out of simple silhouetted imagery, and fun merchandise concepts like foam block hats, square coffee cups, and a set of “Legorreta Letterform” alphabet blocks. “I wanted the museum to own the square,” says Stout. “I want them to be square but hip, too.”

Pentagram has worked with five museums in the Fort Worth Cultural District: in addition to our identity for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, we designed the identity for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and are currently designing programs for the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, the Cattle Raiser’s Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum.