MIT Media Lab bi-annual event branding
Branding, print, digitalThe MIT Media Lab holds member events twice a year, gatherings where the Lab's research community meets the member companies whose support makes that research possible. For years, these events were designed in black and white, consistent with the stark elegance of the Pentagram identity. The problem with that consistency was a practical one: nobody wants the same tote bag twice.
Each event now gets its own color, drawn from the Media Lab palette I developed as part of a larger color system extension for the brand, and that color runs through everything. Photography is treated with a single flat color tone, print materials follow suit, and the physical space is transformed accordingly, so that no two events look alike.
There's a historical logic to this approach that I find quietly satisfying: when I attended a lecture by MIT designer Dietmar Winkler, whose work in the 1960s and 70s featured exactly this kind of single-color-plus-black-and-white graphic language, I asked him what had inspired that aesthetic. He laughed and said it was the budget. A single color was what they could afford. The budget constraints of 1970s MIT became the visual language of the institution, and that visual language is still shaping the work I make there now, half a century later.
+ Design: Olivia Verdugo
+ Typeface: Neue Haas Grotesk
© 2026 Olivia S Verdugo