The visual identity of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), the French public cultural institution that unites national museums, has a documented history spanning several redesigns. The organization, now known as RMN-Grand Palais following a merger, has consistently kept a mark designed by Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger at the core of its identity.
Design and History
The original RMN logo was designed in 1969 by Adrian Frutiger. It consisted of a black circle containing a white letter “M.” In 1990, designer Jean Widmer added the text “Réunion des Musées Nationaux” to the circle, a form that remained in use until 2006.[1]
In 2006, the Amsterdam-based studio Experimental Jetset was approached by RMN to redesign the logo. The brief was to shift emphasis from the single “M” or the full name to the acronym “RMN.” The studio’s solution was to cut the original circled “M” logo in half using a 66-degree slash, liberating the “R” and “N” from the letterform and placing them alongside the “M” to complete the acronym. Experimental Jetset has noted that the design was inspired by the cut paintings of Lucio Fontana, viewing the slash as a constructive gesture that emphasizes the idea of a “réunion” (reunion) of the letters R and N within the M.[1]
Following the 2011 merger of the RMN with the Grand Palais, the Parisian design agency C-album was tasked with evolving the visual identity of the new entity, RMNGP, while keeping Frutiger’s original logo at the heart of the system. C-album introduced an ecliptic crescent around the “m” symbol, a shape intended to recall the glass roofs of the Grand Palais.[2]
Meaning and Symbolism
Frutiger’s original mark was built on a typographic wordplay: the letter “M” visually results from the combination of the letters “r” and “n.” Frutiger explained that within “musée” (the “m”), the words “réunion” and “nationaux” (the “rn”) are united.[3] This concept was later made explicit in Experimental Jetset’s 2006 redesign, which physically separated the R and N from the M to spell out the full acronym.[1]
Typography and Design
For the 2006 identity system, Experimental Jetset used the typeface Univers, also designed by Adrian Frutiger, referring to it as the “institutional layer” of the system.[1]
For the post-merger RMNGP identity, C-album conceived a custom typeface named “Constellation,” developed by Jean-Baptiste Levée. According to C-album, the typeface is based on the skeleton of the typeface “Avenir,” also created by Frutiger, and was designed to fit the cosmic and stellar theme of the identity.[2] Production Type, which developed the font, describes Constellation as a dot matrix typeface that comes in three versions: Grand, Petite, and Random, the latter using a randomized algorithm to vary dot sizes and generate a sparkling effect.[4]
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