Four marine biologists, a closed sardine plant and a family foundation, 1977 to 1984.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium stands on the site of a sardine cannery, and its buildings still say so. English Wikipedia, drawing on a 2008 history by Connie Chiang, says Stanford University bought the property on Cannery Row that housed the Hovden Cannery in 1967, that the cannery closed in 1973, and that Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station then used it as a warehouse. In the late 1970s four marine biologists, Chuck Baxter and Robin Burnett of Hopkins, Nancy Burnett and Steve Webster of San Jose State University, began planning an aquarium on the site.

Nancy Burnett took the idea to her parents, David and Lucile Packard; David Packard was a co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Wikipedia says their foundation commissioned a feasibility study and that in April 1978 the Packards created the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, which bought the Hovden property from Stanford. Their daughter Julie Packard, also a marine biologist, joined the planning group at about the same time. The Los Angeles Times, in a Reuters report by Dean Lokken published on 25 August 1985, dated the idea to a small group of local biologists in 1977 and described David Packard, then chairman of the foundation board, helping to design the wave-making machine and other devices that imitate the movement of the ocean.

The architects were Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis (EHDD) of San Francisco. Wikipedia says the team chose to rebuild the cannery rather than demolish it: the old warehouse became offices and the boiler house was kept as a non-working exhibit. Cement walls, exposed pipes and what EHDD’s Charles Davis called a “hodgepodge of roofs” echoed the industrial street. The 1985 Los Angeles Times report said the architects had designed the aquarium to resemble the cannery that John Steinbeck described in his 1945 novel Cannery Row, with the old boilers left intact in a courtyard.

The aquarium opened on 20 October 1984. Wikipedia says that, in reference to the disappearance of the sardines that had closed the canneries, it announced that “the fish are back!”

Local habitats, a seafood card and a new chief executive.

The exhibits were planned around the bay itself. Wikipedia says the founders’ idea of showing the habitats of Monterey Bay and central California drew on the ecologist Ed Ricketts and his 1939 book Between Pacific Tides. The 1985 Los Angeles Times report described the two main tanks at opening: the Kelp Forest, nearly three storeys tall and fed with seawater pumped in at night, and the Monterey Bay tank, shaped like an hourglass with a long straight run for sharks. A second wing devoted to the open ocean opened in 1996; Wikipedia says it was renamed from Outer Bay to Open Sea during a renovation completed in 2011.

The aquarium’s consumer seafood programme began on a restaurant table. The Los Angeles Times food writer Russ Parsons reported on 13 May 2015 that in 1997 the aquarium staged an exhibition about sustainability called “Fishing for Solutions”, and that its restaurant put out table cards listing fish to seek out and fish to avoid. Staff noticed the cards disappearing, and Seafood Watch was officially launched in 1999. Parsons described wallet-sized cards in six regional editions, a smartphone app introduced in 2009, and three ratings, Best Choice, Good Alternative and Avoid. Programme director Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly told him that “no one wants to be on our Avoid list.”

For more than four decades the aquarium had one director. A University of California, Santa Cruz profile dated 1 January 2018 said Julie Packard had been executive director since 1984. The attractions trade site blooloop reported on 19 February 2026 that Dr Jenny Gray, chief executive of Zoos Victoria in Australia since 2007, would take over from Packard in May 2026 as the Nancy Burgermeister Chief Executive Officer.

A kelp frond, a sand colour and a move to blue.

Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens build their identities around living collections, and the marks they choose often show it: a single animal, a leaf, a flower or a fish drawn as a simple outline that can be cut into a gate, printed on a ticket and stitched onto a staff shirt. The drawing style matters as much as the subject. A fine scientific illustration suggests research and record-keeping, while a bold, flat silhouette reads from across a car park and scales down to a phone screen. Many institutions keep both, using a plain mark for the brand and a deeper library of illustrations for exhibits, guides and the shop.

The other half of the identity is the site itself. Visitors spend hours outdoors on paths that branch, loop and change with the seasons, so wayfinding carries much of the brand’s daily work: colour-coded zones, pictograms, distance markers and maps that double as souvenirs. Signage has to survive sun, rain, frost and curious hands, which pushes designers towards durable materials, high-contrast type and panels that can be replaced one at a time. Glasshouses, aviaries and enclosures often become the emblem, since a recognisable building can stand for the whole place on a poster or a postcard. Throughout, the brand balances two voices: the invitation to a family day out and the message about conservation, research and care for species and habitats, and the design has to let both speak without one drowning the other.

Richard Graef’s kelp symbol and Pentagram’s 2024 redrawing.

The aquarium’s symbol is a strand of giant kelp curled into a circle, and it has been in use since the doors opened. The People’s Graphic Design Archive, in an entry updated on 22 February 2023, publishes correspondence from Julie Packard, passed on by the designer Abbott Miller, saying that the logo was designed by Richard Graef of Ace Design, a subcontractor to the exhibition designer Fred Usher, who led the team. Packard wrote that Graef also designed the building signage, the square grey panels. Her one instruction, she wrote, was that the logo could not be blue and could not be fish or waves; she later allowed blue because the kelp colour was difficult across different applications. The same entry quotes Louise Sandhaus’s book on California graphic design, which says a two-colour rendering of “the growing tip of a giant kelp frond” was Usher’s favourite, but that the aquarium used a one-colour version.

For the aquarium’s 40th anniversary the identity was refreshed by Pentagram. PRINT magazine reported on 18 March 2024 that the team, led by partner Abbott Miller, was asked to unify print and digital graphics, environmental graphics and exhibitions, merchandise, advertising and social media. The redrawing simplifies the fronds so the mark scales more easily, and the symbol now also works as a frame or filter for photographs, as a halftone or multi-line drawing, and as a continuous repeat pattern made with the illustrator Yehrin Tong. Pentagram’s project page names wayfinding among the applications.

Type was drawn to sit with the kelp. PRINT reported that the new wordmark adapts Nocturno, a serif by Peter Bil’ak and Nikola Djurek of Typotheque, with shorter descenders and curves meant to connect it to the symbol, and that the brand typefaces are Nocturno with the sans serifs Peak and Peak Rounded by Xavier Erni of Neo Neo / Extraset. Miller told the magazine that the aquarium began with a two-tone sand colour and later moved to ocean blue; the team tested sand and yellow-green directions before keeping blue as the core, with three shades of ocean blue and green, a range of neutrals, black and white. Pentagram says the wider palette draws on the water, sand, kelp, algae, urchins and octopuses of the bay.

For a design guide, Monterey Bay Aquarium shows how a single symbol from an opening-day sign programme can carry an institution for forty years, with later typography and colour drawn to fit it rather than replace it. Compare San Diego Zoo, another Californian living collection with its own identity history, and Smithsonian, a museum institution whose guide follows a long-lived symbol. For this guide we use bay blue, kelp green and cannery sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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