Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is Canada’s largest museum, a world-renowned cultural institution showcasing art, world culture and natural history. The objective was to help transform ROM into a dynamic presence for the 21st century. We needed to modernize ROM and make it appeal to a domestic and international audience — so when people travel to Toronto, they would make it a cultural destination to visit.

Our challenge was to re-imagine the brand’s identity to be bold and contemporary, while possessing the longevity to be timeless. It needed to be understated so the visuals of the objects and artifacts could shine, and be used in hundreds of applications, across every touchpoint, from museum signage to wayfinding, to collateral, editorial, and advertising.

ROM houses over 13 million objects and artifacts from across time. Every year, era, decade, and century lives in one place. Millions of moments in time exist in one building. And every object in ROM is a portal to powerful stories that live on forever. This inspired the brand’s new identity and an immortal timeline was the creative idea for the rebrand. By aligning with ROM’s vision to help people understand the past, make sense of the present and come together to shape a shared future – we designed a world-class identity that brought ROM’s vision to life. The identity created a heartbeat for the brand within the city, resonating with art and culture lovers within Toronto, as well as with international visitors.

A custom typeface and typographical system was designed to mimic an immortal timeline. Each letter, object, artifact, is a stitch in time, to signify that we’re looking at a bigger story. The typographic approach expands and contracts, allowing people to immerse themselves into any moment of our collective history. A strong photography style was developed, showcasing artifacts on a simple white background, giving people

a feeling of experiencing a moment in time. The brand’s identity is clean, bold and possesses the longevity to be timeless. The visual design system is adaptive to work across every touchpoint in the museum including signage, wayfinding, collateral, to editorial and high impact advertising formats.

A Brand Health study was conducted in June 2022 to understand ROM’s brand awareness, brand perception and brand health that ROM carries in Toronto and surrounding areas. Unaided, ROM saw an uptick compared to 2021 as a top-of-mind venue for an outing with family and friends, indicating positive efforts in the new branding strategy and visual identity refresh.