NAO Museum association

nenets autonomous okrug

Single brand to rule them all

It's always pleasant for our structural thinking to create unification parent brands. Single strong brand is always better than dozen of weak ones. There are roughly 6 museums across small NAO region, that used to live their own life, until one day, the NAO Museum Association was created, whose main idea was to consolidate both marketing, financial and content departments of all. That was a very good beginning.

Client: NAO Museum Association

Work: Branding, design

2020

We had been asked to make a consolidation brand for the museums of our lovely minimalistic region. We started at two museums, located in Naryan-Mar: the Lore Museum and the Pustozersk museum. Both had their own identity and if the Lore Museum had been in need of good redesign, then Pustozersk was maintained by our team and there was a lot of work done for it. We didn't want to loose it.

Parent brands have something in common: you always have to think future. What if another one museum will become a part of the brand, how easy will it be to join the family? It's all about prediction.

Igor Makovsky

ART DIRECTION, DESIGNER

We wanted to make the sun the main image. It corresponds to the nenets culture, where the sun is widely appreciated. Also it suits to our NAO minimalist philosophy of three shapes, where the third one also stands for the sun.

NAO logo which stands for deer, choom (nenets house) and sun

NAO Museum association logo

Strategy and slogan

We got a scalable and flexible slogan that can be used for expanding the association and for communication needs: it sounds succinctly enough for NAO: "under one sun". There are 8 museums in association, and all of them got their personal branding visualisation.

Under one sun

Left-to-right: Nenets Lore Museum (1), Pustozersk Settlement (2), Shevelev house (3), Sumarokov House in Ustie (4), Maremyanin House in Oskino (5), Velikovisochnoe (6), Andeg (7), Kotkino (8)

Merch

Museum merch is there not only to be aesthetically beautiful, rather than educate you something or motivate you help the local bird species.

Merch designed by Katya Semenova in 2024

Online

Soon after the brand creation we had been asked to implement it online first: there a few pages on vk and the single official website. All the work had been made by other guys, we consulted and made a set of illustrations.

Official museum website and vk

Micro illustration made for the NAO Museum Association website and vk

The Night of the museum festival

This is the annual festival across Russia, that any museum can participate, when visiting a museum goes completely free the whole night. These maraphon is widely covered in press, so people in general love to spend this day visiting museums and have fun. We've been asked to make design for the first event in shitty-covidy 2020.

Exhibitions

Museum puts on street exhibitions often in Naryan-Mar. We've made the single layout design for it, so that all the exhibitions look stylish.

Exhibition stand for NAO Museum Association

Maps

We've made a recognizable and unique way of illustrations for all the NAO Museum Association that came up from Pustozersk maps. Design is easy to print and has a lack of small details, making it quite sustainable to insufficient quality of printing services across tundra. When a festival takes part somewhere, we draw a map using readymade elements and it takes little time.

Map of Ustie village

Usage

Local museums got their personal visuals, yet also got a parent brand upon them. That means that we're planning to work with every of them one by one as soon as they get more introduced into the museum family. Such region-wide events, like the museum-night help spreading the brand identity to all the smaller museums. Also does the maps.

Nao museum association in media

Nao24 with an article on the interview with the head of the museum association, three years since the launch
Smotrim.ru radioculture audio interview
Finetuning the museum territory

Flexible identity made for the NAO museum association, relieves a lot of headaches in terms of design. Lesser museums that we unite typically has a very low level of communicating and visuals. The unification of design helps us support the right level of design across the whole NAO region and successfully hold multiregional exhibitions.