The Cream of the Crop

First launched in 2016 as a pop-up museum experience — now technically an “experium” — in New York, NY, the Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC) is made up of “beautiful and shareable environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections, providing fun, multi-sensorial expressions of ice cream”. Its success was instant, selling more than 300,000 tickets in its first five days, later traveling to Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco (where, after a 1-year engagement, became the first permanent location in 2018). To match and spearhead the growth of MOIC, its founders have even established a new company, Figure8, dedicated to it as well as to new “experiums”, leading with a flagship permanent location opened in Soho in New York — 25,000 square feet over 3 floors of ice cream-related Instagram goodness — that opened this past Fall with a new identity designed by New York-based The Working Assembly.

(Before getting into the review: Happy new year to everyone and may all your logo wishes come true in 2020.)

The old logo was mostly fine, in an unassuming Art Deco-ish sans serif with its biggest issue being how thin it was and its highly distracting ® glyph. The new wordmark is an improvement by its weight gain alone, making it more visible and easier to reproduce but its letterforms are also a little more jovial, especially the round “A”. However, it’s not exactly exciting or even interesting as a logo. To complement the dry wordmark is a new icon in the form of an abstract scoop/swirl of ice cream that spells “MOIC” somewhat cleverly in it — it’s a good idea and the execution was close but would have benefitted from a letterer’s touch to take it to the next level. The two elements together do get the point across, easily and convincingly, that this museum is indeed all about ice cream.

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In a way, the logos don’t really have to do much heavy lifting as the museums themselves are the brand with pretty much every room being a photogenic brand touchpoint and instant Instagram fodder that effectively promotes and identifies MOIC with every instance that @museumoficecream is tagged. With the museum as a backdrop, the identity elements — the wordmark, the icon, the use of Bookmania, and a rainbow color palette — all they have to do is quietly support the experiences and modestly enhance and unify them, which they do appropriately and engagingly.

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Overall, all the applications are good and mostly enjoyable but I feel like they fall a bit short of matching the excitement and execution of the museum itself. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do think this is good, like, chocolate-ice-cream-good but I think it could have been chocolate-ice-cream-with-chocolate-chips-and-fudge-swirls-good.