MOCA LAFORM FINDS FUNCTION

MOCA LA has never behaved much like a museum. Founded by artists in 1979, split between two very different buildings in downtown Los Angeles (MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary), and somehow both international and stubbornly local, it has spent nearly five decades making its own rules. Its identity has changed along the way. One thing hasn’t: the brilliantly simple logo designed by Chermayeff & Geismar in 1984. A circle. A square. A triangle. And a C. Not much, really. And somehow, plenty. Our job was to bring MOCA’s history, character, and restless energy to a digital experience made for now. Without turning the museum into something it isn’t.

Museum websites have a strange tendency to become museums themselves. Rooms inside rooms. Menus inside menus. Departments, collections, calendars, archives, information about information. Before you know it, the art is somewhere down the hall. MOCA needed the opposite. A website that gets you where you want to go without telling you where to go. One that works from the smallest screen to the largest. One that feels unmistakably MOCA without dressing up as MOCA. So the question wasn’t how to reinvent the identity for digital. It was how far we could push what was already there.

We started with a small problem. Literally. On a phone, how do you keep navigation close to your thumb and out of the art’s way? The answer had been sitting in the logo since 1984. We took MOCA’s circle and square, moved them to the bottom of the screen, and gave them a job. Two familiar shapes became navigation. The logo stopped being something you looked at and became something you used. From there, the idea grew. Circle and square became a digital grammar: opening menus, marking content, identifying locations, and creating continuity across pages, screens, and scrolls. What began as a mobile gesture expanded into the logic of the entire experience. Around it, we made everything else simpler. Less hierarchy. Fewer detours. More art. The result feels like MOCA because it doesn’t try very hard to look like MOCA. Identity becomes interface. Interface becomes identity. Each makes the other more useful. We didn’t add a new visual language. We simply discovered that the old one had more to say.