The Museum of Contemporary Beauty is a fictional web-based museum that was designed
by SVA student Pedro Sanches. The theoretical museum focuses on the normalized use of Photoshop in fashion campaigns, advertisements, and throughout social media.
Sanches states that the museum’s identity is explored through the user’s navigational process rather than through traditional branding techniques such as the use of brand-specific typefaces or the creation of a logo. In fact, the only font used throughout the entire website is Arial, a font that’s about as nonspecific as it gets. Although Sanches never specifically states, the decision to use Arial as the museum’s primary typeface is consistent with Sanches’s comment on the standardization of unrealistic photo editing, given Arial’s history and the Internet’s undeniable role in the normalization of Photoshopping.
While, admittedly, this project is more about branding than modular typefaces (in fact, the chosen typeface is arguably the least important component of the fictitious brand), there’s still something to be learned here. Modular, combinatorial, or responsive systems don’t exist only within the context of specific fonts. In Sanches’s case, he chose a widely-used and recognizable typeface and created a branding system around enabling the user to alter it, which in turn reflects the museum’s core message.
Assuming that the “Museum of Contemporary Beauty” typeset in Arial is the museum’s logo, their entire identity is based upon the user’s decision (or indecision) to click, pinch, drag, and distort it. Could this be another hidden comment, suggesting that the identity of those in and affected by advertisements rests upon the unrealistic beauty standards set by
those pinching, dragging, and distorting
their bodies?