National Museum of Coincidence
More often than not, we unfortunately don’t win in competitions and today’s post is about our unpicked design. Once upon a time the National Museum in Warsaw announced a contest for a much-needed redesign of its branding. Below you can see the winning entry, a work by a Warsaw studio, which is a decisive improvement over the previous inconsistent branding of the Museum. The whole logo is based on a ligature-related concept of creating a mark based on the Museum’s monogram MNW.
We quite like this logo, particularly the slash between the mark and the logotype, maybe less so the serif letter of the logotype. But what really surprised us was how close the idea was to ours, which you can see below.
We know it’s the internet, the land of accusation, so we want to make one thing abundantly clear: we’re sure there’s no relation between our design and the winning one, other than a similar idea that popped into several heads at once (and for all we know there might have been a dozen other entries based on the same thing). We’re also not showing this to bitch that we didn’t win and someone with a similar concept did. We simply wanted to show our design and it’d be hard to ignore this coincidence when talking about it.
We also based our concept on a ligature built from M, N and W but made it less radical – all the letters are present – and made it resemble a winding ribbon.
Business card and letterhead, both with red reverse.
Gift bags, to use in the kiosk with souvenirs.
One concept with two different applications. Very cool to see. I love the pattern you created with your logo on the black bag.
Cool design!
WOW! Cool design. Uncanny coincidence. The shades and tones automically look specially appealing but I particularly love the colors used.
How weird how close they are in style. Like your ideas though,especially the bag design – very classy!
Wow. They are so very similar. I like the brevity of the winning version but I like the cleaner lines, shading effect and graduating tones of yours.