DNCO gets London's Museum of the Home ready for its reopening with a shadow-inspired rebrand

London-based design consultancy DNCO created the new brand for the Museum of the Home, ready for its reopening in the summer of 2020 following an £18.1 million redevelopment. The iconic East-London museum was established in 1914 as the Geffrye Museum of the Home and is housed in the Geffrye Almshouses, a charitable housing development built-in 1714 by former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Geffrye. The fourteen buildings are used to exhibit the various interior design styles that have defined how we’ve lived since the 1600s. The new identity is inspired by the shadows that are cast when light is focused on an object. This idea informed Home Sans, a custom typeface created by shadows, produced by DNCO in collaboration with Colophon Foundry. Through its three weights, its distinctive diagonal cuts are dialled up and down, retaining legibility thanks to simple and bold application across advertising and collateral. Gabriel Weichert, Design Director at DNCO adds: “Light plays an incredibly important role in homes. It creates spaces, sets the atmosphere, brings things to the fore, or hides them from view. The graphic language also uses layers of shadow to reveal different kinds of content – typography, illustration, photography.”