Steinhart Aquarium

Centennial branding

OPPORTUNITY
The Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco is home to nearly 40,000 live animals. It celebrates it 100-year anniversary in 2023. The aquarium team wanted a logo that would reflect this long history while also looking forward to an optimistic future. This logo ideally needed to celebrate the centennial but also have the flexibility not to feature any years.

​SOLUTION
I designed several logo options that related to the history I learned about the aquarium and the organisms it housed. Although the aquarium was established in 1923, the clients specifically wished for the design to lean toward midcentury visual styles, because the aquarium grew most rapidly in popularity and expanded its offerings during those decades.

The right-most option was the selected logo design. It features the moorish idol (Zanclus cornutus), an iconic organism for the aquarium, swimming forward in a lockup that can be easily separated from the date of the aquarium’s establishment. I custom-drew the 1 in the 100 for a streamlined look suggesting both waves and fins.

I also designed potential applications of the fish motif, modeling how it can be applied to suggest movement and diversity across a range of formats: