A British scientist’s will and an act of Congress.

The Smithsonian Institution takes its name from James Smithson, a British scientist. English Wikipedia says Smithson left most of his wealth to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, and that when Hungerford died without children in 1835 the estate passed “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men,” as the will directed.

Turning that sentence into an institution took years. Congress accepted the legacy, and then, Wikipedia says, spent eight years arguing over how to interpret Smithson’s brief mandate. The money was invested in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas, which defaulted; the Massachusetts representative and former president John Quincy Adams persuaded Congress to restore the lost funds with interest. The Smithsonian was founded on 10 August 1846.

The phrase from the will has stayed with the institution. Wikipedia describes the Smithsonian as created by the federal government “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” and notes that it operates as a trust instrumentality that is not formally part of any of the three branches of government. Its founding secretary, Joseph Henry, wanted a centre for scientific research, but the institution also became the depository for government collections, including specimens from the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842.

The Smithsonian’s publications carry the name well beyond Washington. Wikipedia lists Smithsonian and Air & Space among its magazines, and says that, beyond its museums in Washington, it has facilities in Maryland, New York and Virginia and a network of Smithsonian Affiliates in other states, Puerto Rico and Panama.

The idea of a national museum in Washington was older than the bequest. Wikipedia traces it to a group of citizens who met on 28 June 1816 to establish the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, which received a charter from Congress in 1818. That charter expired in 1838, and the National Institution, founded in 1840 with the aim of establishing a national museum of natural history, continued to press Congress. Some of the earlier institute’s specimens passed to the Smithsonian after it was formed. Science was part of the early work: the regents drew up a plan for weather observation in 1846, and money was set aside for meteorological research in 1847, Wikipedia says.

From the Castle to the Mall.

Construction of the Smithsonian Institution Building, known as “the Castle,” began in 1849 to a design by the architect James Renwick Jr., Wikipedia says; its interiors were completed by the contractor Gilbert Cameron and it opened in 1855.

The institution then grew into a group of museums, and each new building added a name and a façade. Wikipedia records the Arts and Industries Building, designed by Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze, in 1881; the National Zoological Park, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, in 1889; the National Museum of Natural History in June 1911, built to house the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum, which had previously been housed in the Castle and then in the Arts and Industries Building; and the Freer Gallery in 1923, built with the collection and funds of the Detroit collector Charles Lang Freer.

More than 40 years passed before the next museum, Wikipedia says. The Museum of History and Technology, designed by McKim, Mead & White, opened in 1964 and was renamed the National Museum of American History in 1980. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden followed in 1974 and the National Air and Space Museum on 1 July 1976. The National Museum of African Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery opened in 1987 in an underground building between the Freer and the Castle, and the National Postal Museum in 1993 in the former City Post Office building. The National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, Wikipedia says.

Each of those museums carries its own name and building, and each needed a way to show that it belonged to the same institution.

Signage, badges and posters.

A museum’s identity has to work across a wide range of surfaces. The wordmark appears on a banner several storeys high, on a gallery map folded into a coat pocket, on a ticket stub and on a website header, and it has to read the same way on all of them. For that reason many museum marks are built from type alone, with the letterforms doing the work that a pictorial symbol would do elsewhere.

Entrance signage sets the first impression: a name cut into stone or set in metal above a doorway tends to stay in place for decades, so the printed identity often has to sit comfortably beside lettering that is far older than it. Admission tokens add a smaller, more tactile layer. Clip-on badges, stickers and wristbands change colour by day or by season, which turns a simple proof of entry into a recognisable object in its own right.

Exhibition posters are where an identity is tested hardest. Each show brings its own imagery, so a durable system usually fixes only a few things, such as the position and size of the name, a typeface and a grid, and leaves the rest free for the artwork on display.

The sunburst of 1998.

The answer was a single symbol. The Smithsonian logo, a sunburst, was designed by the New York firm Chermayeff & Geismar in 1998, according to The Arts Fuse, which published a remembrance of the designer Ivan Chermayeff by Mark Favermann on 19 December 2017. The piece lists the Smithsonian Institution sunburst among Chermayeff’s logos, alongside marks for the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress and National Geographic.

According to the same article, Chermayeff was a founder in 1957 of what was originally Chermayeff & Geismar, a firm known for crisp, bold modernist designs that often used primary colours, and for building corporate identity through simple abstraction and strong letterforms. The Arts Fuse reported that Chermayeff died on 2 December 2017.

The result is a symbol that does not depend on any one building: the same sun can be used by a museum in the Castle’s neighbourhood on the Mall or by one opened in 2004 or 2016.

For a design guide, the Smithsonian shows how one simple symbol can hold together a family of museums that each have their own name and building. Compare MoMA, another Chermayeff & Geismar client, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For this guide we use navy, gold and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Smithsonian’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.