Pentagram Transforms MIT Media Lab's Logo

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is holy ground not just for scientists and engineers, but for graphic designers as well. In the sixties, designers like Jacqueline Casey, Dietmar Winkler, Ralph Coburn and Muriel Cooper adapted the visual forms of European modernism to a lively, particularly American version that marked MIT as a place that balanced rigor and invention. Perhaps nowhere at MIT was that design impulse more pronounced than at the MIT Media Lab, which Cooper co-founded and where she ran the Visual Language Workshop. Nearly 30 years after its founding, the Media Lab has a new visual identity designed by Pentagram.

Design agency Pentagram has used a simple grid of squares to create a new visual identity for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s research centre.

If you make your way over to the MIT Media Lab website, you’ll notice a subtle difference in the top lefthand corner of the page. For the last three years, the space was occupied by a logo that looked like three spotlights projecting multi-colored beams into the unknown distance. Created by Richard The and Roon Kang for the Lab’s 25th anniversary in 2011, the spotlights were generated by an algorithm that could generate up to 40,000 permutations of the logo.

Pentagram designers Michael Bierut and Aron Fay based the branding on a logo created for MIT Media Lab's 25th anniversary in 2011 by designer Richard The, based on a seven-by-seven grid.

It was a brilliant bit of design, ever-changing just like the Media Lab itself. So when MIT got in touch with Pentagram partner Michael Bierut about overhauling the identity, Bierut was surprised by the ask. “I said, ‘you already have a logo,” he recalls.

The 2011 identity was an apt visual representation of the Lab’s varied research, which includes (but is definitely not limited to) topics like synthetic neurobiology, game design, prosthetic design and material research. But MIT wanted something more stable, something that communicated the idea that these 23 separate research labs were part of the bigger, cohesive MIT family. “It came down to the issue that every organization that’s trying to communicate graphically comes to, which is: how do you get unity without uniformity?” says Bierut. To find an answer for that dilemma, Bierut and his team looked to the past.

The new identity was unveiled at the Media Lab’s Fall Members Meeting, which was organized, appropriately, around the theme of “Deploy.” To celebrate that theme, Aron Fay extended the identity’s visual language with multiple expressions of the word. The result was a not only a debut of a new identity, but a real-time demonstration of that new identity’s endless potential.

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