Frontify presents: How Gretel and Philadelphia Art Museum navigated change

Welcome back to The Dialogue, a series presented in collaboration with one of the world’s leading brand-building platforms, Frontify. In these conversations, we are exploring the collaborative relationships behind exceptional brand design work through paired conversations with creative partners, revealing how studios and clients work together to produce transformative results. For this conversation, we sat down with both Gretel and the Philadelphia Art Museum to discuss their partnership in rebranding one of America’s largest and most beloved cultural institutions. What emerged is a story of how strategic alignment, cultural immersion and honest dialogue can navigate the complexities of modernising institutional identity – and how the strongest collaborations create work that honours legacy whilst embracing change. When Gretel received the request for proposal in early 2024, the Brooklyn studio recognised something unusual in the brief. This wasn’t a museum seeking polish or refinement. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was signalling a fundamental shift in how it wanted to exist in the world. “From the moment it hit our inbox we were in,” Executive Creative Director Ryan Moore recalls. “The RFP expressed a clear ambition to change the perception of the institution. That work was well underway on various fronts, and it was time to evolve the brand to match.” The museum had sent proposals to over 40 agencies nationally and internationally, casting a wide net for a partner who could handle both strategic rigour and creative ambition. What made Gretel stand out wasn’t just their portfolio – it was their previous work for the Rhode Island School of Design, which had addressed similar institutional branding challenges. “At every turn, Gretel’s strategic rigour stood out and demonstrated how their design thinking was firmly rooted in a thoughtful strategy,” the museum’s team notes. The brief centred on a metaphor that would become the project’s guiding principle: “coming down the steps and throwing the doors wide open.” For an institution whose famous Rocky Steps are arguably more recognised globally than the museum itself, this wasn’t just poetic language. It represented a genuine commitment to transformation. “From the outset we realised that we were making a brand to attract new audiences,” the museum explains. “We obviously want to retain our current visitors but we felt that we needed a new identity that felt welcoming and ‘for all Philadelphians.’” This ambition shaped everything from accessibility consultations to material choices, but it also created an immediate tension: how do you make one of the country’s finest museums more approachable without diminishing its institutional authority?