Teach the powers of seeing
In 2017 the Ackland Art Museum received its largest gift. Donated by Dr. Sheldon Peck and his late wife Leena, the gift included 134 largely 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and Flemish drawings by artists including Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyke.
An important condition of the Pecks' gift was that the Ackland should make the collection freely available online for a worldwide audience. Cogapp was delighted to be selected to help with this mission by creating a a new visual identity and interface for the collection.
The logo is modelled on 17th century Dutch printers' marks. To add a playful touch, we designed four different variants, one of these is selected at random each time a page is displayed. Each variation contains a detail from one of the Peck drawings. Design colours are based on the colours traditionally used for mounting and framing old master drawings.
Graphical elements we created as part of the wider design system included hand drawn illustrations of the original 17th-century paper watermarks – used for background patterns, placeholder images and printed merchandise.
A key element of the design system is a typeface called Custodia. This is a modern digital font based on 17th-century Dutch typography. It has abundant character while remaining readable. Before we confirmed its use we did a comprehensive and systematic review for accessibility and readability. For more detail on choosing an accessible typeface see our blog post exploring the subject.
The version of Custodia that you see on the Peck website is a variant we commissioned from @fred.smeijers that includes the redrawn monolinear character to aid readability.
