Abbe Museum: A Destination-Worthy Brand for Wabanaki Arts & Cultures
Bar Harbor, Maine hosts about 3 million people each year. As the gateway to Acadia National Park, many come for the trails, the lobster, the harbor. Fewer realize they’re visiting Dawnland — the Wabanaki homeland. Most walk past the Abbe Museum, the Wabanaki-governed museum that holds 12,000 years of an unfolding story. It’s new branding makes it unmissable.
The Abbe Museum is dedicated to advancing understanding of Wabanaki Nations’ heritage, living cultures, and homelands—12,000 years and counting of Wabanaki presence and artistic practice in Maine.
For the past decade, it’s shifted to majority-Wabanaki governance, while presenting world-class contemporary exhibitions by living artists, developing its unparalleled collection of artifacts, and evolving its programming to deepen engagement. It went from a collection about the Wabanaki into a true Wabanaki living culture institution—it now needed a brand designed to reflect that.
The new Abbe Museum identity is a workhorse brand, designed to command attention, communicate what the museum is about, and draw in more visitors across its two locations—and be easy and practical to use by non-designer team members.
—
Jump To:
Testimonial / Approach / Process / Logo / Color Palette / Typography / Layout / Results
As Featured On
In-House International and their research partners at Allelo brought fresh creative energy, deep cultural awareness, genuine collaboration to our brand refresh. They thoughtfully incorporated guidance from our Wabanaki board members and advisors and invested the time to reflect our values at every turn ensuring the work was both culturally grounded and engaging for broader public audiences. Working with them was a truly positive experience, and we are delighted to have a brand identity that feels authentic, accessible, and impactful.
Betsy Richards
Executive Director, Abbe Museum
Approach
The Abbe Museum aims to illuminate and advance understanding of Wabanaki Nations’ heritage, living cultures, and homelands. It’s brand needed to start doing that work from the outside—and is meaningfully, genuinely an expression guided by Wabanaki community members.
As with all brand work, understanding comes first. Our research partners at Allelo Design facilitated a workshop with the Wabanaki-majority board, and conducted onsite research and interviews.
Onsite, they found that visitors were surprised by the museum’s caliber and scope. They came in expecting ‘dusty old archive’, and found contemporary, visually striking, historically rich, and culturally resonant experience that invariably made an impression. Most reported that they had nearly walked past it—at both its downtown and at its Acadia National Park locations, which many people failed to recognize as part of the same institution.
These findings translated to developing a new brand that could overcome the barriers to visibility, recognition, understanding, and engagement that stood in the way of the Abbe Museum’s mission. We aligned the work to the following four outcomes:
- Increase Visibility. Through distinctive branding that conveys what the Abbe Museum is like, expanding awareness.
- Deepen Pride & Presence. Representation that Wabanaki community members and board members can see themselves in.
- Clarify Experience: Ensure Wabanaki focus and broad scope of programming are immediately clear, clarify the connection between its two locations.
- Powerfully practical. Deliver a brand toolkit that the museum’s small team can manage and use themselves.
Process
For the brand design, we compiled competitors and substitute visual identities to eliminate design options that lack distinctiveness. We then focused on developing concepts that deepen pride and presence, looking for themes shared among the various Wabanaki Nations of the Dawnland—the Wabanaki homeland that’s now Maine. Basket-weaving, the Dawnland’s connection to the sun, and the colors and materials of the natural landscape make up the core graphic references of the new Abbe Museum brand identity.
The Abbe Museum’s look and feel needed to balance vibrancy and distinctiveness and the contemporary / living history aspect of its presence with a sense of credibility and institutional longevity that communicates both the Wabanaki’s long history in the region and the upcoming centennial of the Abbe’s founding as a collection.
To help clarify the experience, we started by considering the name. “Abbe Museum” has history but very low brand recognition outside Bar Harbor, and a name that lacks significant information about the content of the museum. The board opted to keep the Abbe Museum as the name, and pair it with “Wabanaki Arts and Cultures” as a subtitle embedded into the logotype.
Logo Design
The graphic logo comes from the shape of basket-spoke; the the starting point of basket construction in a round radial shape that connects with Wabanaki craft and can also read as a sun (with it’s connection to the first light), bringing a recognizable look that’s both contemporary and timeless.
The spokes are the starting point for basketry, communicating Wabanaki peoples’ foundational presence, influence and a continued connection inextricably woven into contemporary life.
The resulting icon was typeset into a main Abbe Museum logo in wide range of lockup configurations. The icon is also the basis for two sub-brands, creating higher consistency across all Abbe Museum related programing: the first is for the annual Dawnland Festival of Arts & Ideas. The second is a special mark and visual system ahead of the museum’s centennial in 2028.
Color Palette
The palette comes directly from images of the sunrise in the Dawnland. We selected colors that are rooted to place and time, vibrant and that stand out. Flexibility and practicality were also key considerations: seventeen colors from deep to birch cream to dawn orange are endlessly combinable, with sub-palettes for warm and cool tones. To balance choices, we delivered palette use cheat-sheet which helps keep Abbe Museum team members easily select and use colors day to day.
Typography
The logotype uses Asul, a baroque humanist typeface featuring semi-serifs, so it feels weighty without feeling dusty. We extended the use of Asul to titles and headlines connecting the brand with its many editorial and practical uses across digital, print, and programs.
Subtitles, body text, links and section headers use Inter, a modern and subtle sans serif that’s practical, easy to read, and pairs well with Asul.
Graphic Elements
There’s two sets of graphic elements rounding out the ‘ingredients’ for the Abbe Museum brand system:
- Patterns: a set of over 20 patterns derived from craft details sampled from artifacts created by each of the the five Wabanaki Nations
- Colorized textures: A library of natural texture treatment using photos featuring close ups of natural elements found in the region tinted using the new color palette.
Layout System
The radial geometry of the Abbe Museum logo really comes to life in the brand’s layout system. Rather than column-based templates, the Abbe Museum’s layouts follow basket start pattern from the logo and extends it into a radial grid, assembling text, photos, and custom graphic elements rendered in the Abbe Museum’s newly sharpened color palette. High-information sets use a multi-colored layout with a border that can include patterns and textures. Merch and more pared down surfaces can use the radial pattern as a main graphic with sparse text. The result is a recognizable public facing identity that’s rooted in meaning and place and very distinctive.
To make the layout practical for use, the brand system assets, graphics, colors, typefaces, textures, layouts, patterns are baked into a library of Canva templates that cover production-ready applications across every touchpoint — annual report covers, business cards, name tags, rack cards, sandwich boards, stationery, fundraising materials, and social media.
The result is a robust brand that the Abbe Museum team can use to generate day to day public-facing materials without having to rely on outside professionals.
Results
The Abbe Museum’s updated brand system is striking, memorable and well positioned for increased visibility locally, nationally, and globally, helping it become a destination in its own right.
All while remaining practical for everyday use by the museum’s compact staff.
The design draws new visitors in and gives them a clear reason to come. It communicates the museum’s scope immediately to people who’d never heard of it. It reads as one institution across both locations.
Crucially, it’s a brand identity built for Wabanaki community members first—built in consultation with Wabanaki board members at every step to ensure the visual language is meaningful while respecting culturally significant symbols from all five Nations. It’s a brand identity that Wabanaki visitors and community members can engage with, own, and be proud of.
