Responses by Luke Powell, partner, and Alice Sherwin, senior designer, Pentagram.
Background: MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives is a new cultural destination in Tokyo. It treats Japanese and global culture as a living narrative and has a unique, circular curation approach. The project required an identity and visual system that reflected this and could hold enormous cultural range, speaking to a museum program that explored recurring ideas and themes from across the globe.
Design thinking: The starting point was already embedded in MoN’s own thinking—a plan for circular curation. Working from that foundation, we developed the strategic idea of dimensional time: the understanding that while we experience time as linear, ideas, traditions and culture don't behave that way. They recur, get reinterpreted and loop back to find new meaning in a different age.
The logo is the most direct expression of this. Built from the spiral (in its abstracted geometry, reading M, O, N), this same spiral generates the entire layout logic for the visual system. It is animated and given momentum through a zoom mechanic that moves from the full arc of MoN’s diverse programming.
Paired with the spiral is a bar, the same idea linearized. The spiral carries the concept, and the bars do the practical work of holding and framing content across layouts.
Typography runs bilingual throughout, treating Japanese and English with equal weight. The color palette draws on natural cycles: three brand colors of sun, land and water, colors that give MoN’s palette both a universal resonance and a genuine sense of place in Takanawa.
Challenges: The cultural context presented not so much a challenge but an interesting consideration throughout. We worked collaboratively to understand the relationship between specific Japanese culture and a global-facing cultural institution. MoN was always conceived as a place that welcomes the world, but it is also firmly rooted in community: in the neighborhood of Takanawa, the living traditions of Japanese culture and the idea that culture is something you participate in rather than something you witness from a respectful distance. This was something that needed to be balanced throughout.
Favorite details: The concept reflects and reinforces the essence of the museum. The idea of interpreting and understanding ideas through a circular, nonlinear lens that can be revisited and continuously reflected upon feels poignant in a time where discussions and thinking are often presented as fixed.
New lessons: The project was full of interesting conversations with the client about ways of thinking, especially in relation to cultural influence. For example, we learned about Shinto—Japan’s indigenous, nature-based spirituality. The client explained that rocks (or iwakura) are regarded as sacred vessels for kami (“spirits” or “gods”). They encouraged us to consider: “What if rocks could talk?”. How might this influence our relationship as humans with the world and, in particular, the relationship between buildings and nature? We were led to contemplate a more transient, conceptual way of viewing the world with an absence of hierarchy.
Specific project demands: The MoN team had an open-mindedness and willingness to discuss ideas at an abstract, conceptual level. This is something we are used to doing internally as a team, but being able to talk at that level with the client enabled the project to not only be more enjoyable—and, as a result, easier—but to also have a depth that can be hard to achieve without client engagement.
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