Brand system and ticketing product
A public art institution whose identity changes with every exhibition — held together by a system strict enough to survive being handed to guest designers.
Verge shows eight exhibitions a year and commissions a different designer for each. The result was eight identities annually and no institution underneath them. The brief asked for consistency. The correct answer was not less variation — it was a stricter container for it.
01 — The problem
Verge's commissioning model was its best quality and its branding disaster. Visitors recognised individual exhibitions and not the building that housed them. Membership renewals were falling against rising attendance — people were loyal to shows, not to Verge.
Ticketing made it literal: each exhibition had its own ticket page, its own visual language, and no path from one show to the next.
02 — The thinking
We defined what Verge owns and made everything else free. Verge owns a fixed 14mm frame, a fixed information block in the lower third, one typeface and the position of its mark. Inside the frame, a guest designer can do anything at all.
It is deliberately an uncomfortable amount of freedom for an institution and an uncomfortable amount of constraint for a guest. That tension is the identity.
03 — The making
The ticket flow was rebuilt around the institution rather than the exhibition. Every confirmation ends with what is on next and what a membership would have saved on the ticket just purchased — a specific number, from the actual transaction.
We shipped the frame as a real toolkit: an InDesign and Figma template, a print spec sheet and a two-page rule set, because a system handed to eight strangers a year lives or dies on documentation, not on goodwill.
04 — The result
Two years and sixteen commissions later, no guest designer has broken the frame — the clearest evidence that the constraint was set at the right place. Membership conversion now happens at the moment of purchase rather than in a campaign.
Behind the decisions
Wide enough to hold the information block at poster and ticket scale without redrawing, narrow enough that guest designers stopped arguing about it.
A generic membership pitch is ignorable. 'This ticket would have cost €4 less' is a specific, checkable claim made at the only moment it is relevant.
A printed rule set. Systems given to rotating guests fail at handover, not at design — documentation was scope, not a deliverable afterthought.
Selected artefacts
Outcome
16
None have broken the frame.
14mm
Everything inside it belongs to the artist.
8/yr
One system, no redesign per show.
“They gave us less brand than we asked for and more institution than we had. Our guest designers actually enjoy the constraint, which I did not expect.”
Credits
Identity system
Hana Okada, Júlia Ferreira
Product design
Priya Raman
Documentation
Owen Mbeki
Services used
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