Opinion BY Armin

ROM goes Portal on its Logo

Opened in 1914, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), an agency of the Government of Ontario, is Canada’s largest museum, with a dual focus on natural history and world cultures, attracting over one million visitors each year to its 30 galleries and six million objects in its collection. The museum is also well-known (and easily spotted) for its Daniel Libeskind-designed addition in 2007 that was part of an initiative dubbed “Renaissance ROM” for which the previous logo was designed. This week ROM introduced a new logo designed by New York, NY-based LaPlaca Cohen. (For a Government-owned museum, you know how much grief they must be getting for hiring Yanks.)

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Friday Likes BY Armin

Friday Likes 23

This week I am mining our sister site, Art of the Menu, for some nice restaurant identities. We focus on just the menus over there and plenty of times the identity around the menus is just as cool.

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Friday Likes BY Armin

Friday Likes 17

It’s been a few weeks since I last did this and it’s back with a bang. Two superb eye candy pieces sandwich a more conservative piece with work from Russia, Canada, and the USofA.

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Opinion BY Armin

Hi Hi Birdie

The Toronto Blue Jays joined the Eastern Division of Major League Baseball in 1977 and are two-time World Series winners (1992 and 1993). With the departure of the Montreal Expos to Washington, the Blue Jays are the sole Canadian team in the MLB. Last week, the Blue Jays announced new uniforms and a new logo for the 2012 season, designed by the MLB’s Design Services, that take them back to their original look

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Opinion BY Armin

International Stick Figure

Originally opened in 1939 as Malton Airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport is one of the largest airports in North America handling almost 32 million passengers and 418,292 “aircraft movements” in 2010. Last time I was in Toronto I walked for a good 15 minutes to get to some distant terminal — that thing is huge. It’s not often that we cover airport identity here on Brand New, we’ve done three in the last five years, and that’s because it’s not a typically exciting niche in identity design but Pearson is certainly making a big deal of it. And I’m not saying that in a mocking way, it’s just interesting that they are very consciously branding their airport and trying to do so in a consumer-friendly way. Yesterday, as many of our Canadian readers alerted me, Toronto Pearson International Airport introduced a new identity.

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Opinion BY Armin

OCAD U, All New

Founded in 1876, OCAD University is Canada’s largest art and design institution, located in Toronto, Ontario. Formerly known as Ontario College of Art and Design, the school changed its name in 2007 to OCAD University when it received degree-granting status. Despite the “C” in the name still standing for “College” the acronym was kept as it had substantial equity and recognition. In 2004, OCAD University moved into its new campus, a radical structure designed by Alsop Architects that looks like a cross between a crossword puzzle and those super tall robots from War of the Worlds, with some color sprinkled for good measure. It may sound like a jab at the building, but the thing is truly jaw-dropping when you are standing below it. Anyway. Last night, at the 96th Annual Graduate Exhibition, the school unveiled a new identity, created by Toronto-based Bruce Mau Design (BMD), as well as another slight name change, to OCAD U.

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