Eleven Years at IMMA Dublin
Jan 3, 2025 · Jack Sheehy
Detail have been working with the Irish Museum of Modern Art since 2014. That's eleven years across brand guidelines, identity, wayfinding, signage, digital and print. The scope is a little unusual, as well as the duration.
The starting point was a brand overhaul rather than a ground-up redesign. The existing wordmark was revised and a dual language logotype developed to sit alongside it. To handle Irish language applications properly, Detail worked with Neubau in Berlin to produce a custom display version of NB Grotesk, modified to accommodate the spacing and accent requirements that standard type families rarely account for. It's the kind of detail that gets ignored when institutional budgets are tight or timelines are short. Thankfully here it was treated as a requirement.
The colour system is really flexible by design. A primary palette sits alongside a secondary layer of programme and exhibition colours meaning the identity can shift tone depending on what it's promoting without losing cohesion. That kind of flexibility matters at a museum where the programming never stops and the visual environment needs to carry a lot of different material at once.
The Royal Hospital Kilmainham is a seventeenth-century building. Designing wayfinding inside it means working against a space that already has a strong visual character of its own. The system Detail developed is restrained for that reason, it's legible enough to be functional and unobtrusive enough not to compete with the architecture or the work on the walls. The dual language implementation runs throughout, consistent with IMMA's broader universal design programme.
The website sits at the centre of the whole project and it has to do a lot. Collection archive, events calendar, editorial journal, learning resource, shop: these are genuinely different things that most platforms handle separately. Getting them to coexist without the structure collapsing is a real problem, and it's mostly a content and information architecture problem before it's a visual one. The approach was iterative and heavily tested, which is less glamorous to describe than the identity work but probably harder to get right.
Eleven years on a single institutional client is long enough to absorb significant changes in how that institution communicates. The fact that the system has held across all of it says something about how it was originally built.