New logo: Rijksmuseum

Rijksmuseum is a national art museum in Amsterdam and the second most visited art musuem in the Netherlands, with large collection that includes many important works from the 17th century.

Yesterday, August 22, a new logo was unveiled at the museum. The new identity is being created by Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. It also includes a colour palette and a custom typeface family with no less than nine typefaces created by Paul van der Laan from the type foundry Bold Monday. The logo has a prominent IJ ligature which makes it typically Dutch, but the clean and contemporary design is also made to work internationally.

The previous identity was in use for about three decades and was created by Gert Dumbar's Studio Dumbar, who had previously designed posters for the museum and would later create new signage in the 80s.

The new identity will be implemented in full when the museum reopens in April 2013.
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New logo: Naturalis

Naturalis is the Dutch national museum of natural history and a biodiversity research center, located in the city of Leiden. Its 37 million specimen makes it one of the largest natural history collections in the world. After merging with two other museums in 2010 it has used the temporary name NCB Naturalis.

This month, on July 12, the museum changed its name to Naturalis Biodiversity Center and also launched a new visual identity, created by an agency called DieTwee from Utrecht.
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New logo: National Museum in Warsaw

The National Museum in Warsaw, one of the largest museums in Poland with a significant art collection, has held a contest to create a new visual identity. The result was announced last week, and the contest was won by Antonina Benedek and Rafał Benedek from a design studio called MesmerCenter. The final stage of the competition involved two other agencies, Mamastudio and Parastudio.

Based on the museum's very ligature-friendly abbreviation, MNW, MesmerCenter created a dynamic geometric mark, that is apparently inspired by the museum's main building.
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New logo: Children's Creativity Museum

The Zeum, a multimedia children's museum in San Francisco, reopened las week, on October 15, as the Children's Creativity Museum. The new visual identity was credited to Landor Associates in a press release sent out on October 11. It introduces the "creativity critters", a bunch of cute, bright and friendly mascots that can bee seen around the museum.
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New logo: National Railway Museum

This was apparently a summer of rebrands for British museums. For example, the National Maritime Museum introduced a new identity from SomeOne a few weeks ago. Another British museum with a new look is the National Railway Museum in York, which this summer introduced a new visual identity, created by Thompson Brand Partners in Leeds.

Previous logo.

Thompson's solution is very simple, consisting of two parallel lines, with several meanings:

"The new logo has been designed to reflect the direction the museum is moving in. It is modern, simple, easy to read and dynamic with a clear indication of speed and momentum. It is based on the many angled slashes that can be found in the iconography and architecture of railway throughout history. It also makes subtle reference to rails." - blog post from Thompson

The agency has also created brand guidelines, but says that the implementation will be done in-house at the museum. Thompson have published a few images were the logo is overlayed on thematic images, showing the strength of a simple logo.
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