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Musée Centennial — Creative Direction, Web Design & Multimedia, 2026

Case study
  • Brand Identity & Strategy
  • Website Design & Development

Musée Centennial

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©2026Creative Direction, Web Design & MultimediaRemote
Musée Centennial — the live site

About

One hundred years of graphic design, told by rebuilding the posters in the browser instead of photographing them.

The 1965 hall of Musée Centennial, titled Legibility Is Optional
1965 — “Legibility Is Optional”. Each decade is a hall, and every hall is built in the language of its own decade, so the page argues its subject instead of describing it.

Context

The challenge
A scan shows you what a poster looked like and nothing about how it was built. Construction is the whole subject.
Creative direction
Every poster rebuilt in markup — Lissitzky's wedge, Bayer's alphabet, Cassandre's Nord Express. Rebuilding forces the decisions: the grid, the diagonal, the two-colour limit. One decade per chapter.
Outcome
Exhibits are live type and geometry. Nothing is an image, so every piece stays sharp at any zoom and the century weighs almost nothing.
The 1970s hall showing the NASA worm beside a transit diagram
“The Manual and the Ransom Note”. Vignelli’s grid and Danne & Blackburn’s NASA worm in one room, because they happened in one decade — corporate identity and punk, side by side.
Musée Centennial specimen plates stacked on a phone
At 430px the specimen row does NOT stack — it stays a horizontal run you scroll sideways, plates cut at both edges, with the decade scrubber pinned at the foot. A museum wall does not reflow into a column either.

Notes

  • Posters reconstructed in markup, never scanned — the medium is the argument.
  • One decade per chapter, each with its own typographic voice.
  • Attribution is explicit: every piece reads 'after' its original designer.
  • No raster imagery anywhere, so the archive stays sharp and light.
The final hall, The Machine Speaks Back, set in dark type
“The Machine Speaks Back” — the last hall, and the only one set in the present tense.

Process

  1. Accept that a neutral grid would be a bad argument

    The subject is a hundred years of graphic design. Presenting it in one calm modern grid would be the site quietly claiming that every movement it covers was a detour and the present is the answer. The structure had to be able to disagree with itself.

  2. Give each decade its own voice

    So every hall is set the way its own decade was set, and the site runs five typefaces on purpose. On any other project that is the fault; here a single consistent face would have been the fault. It is the one brief where consistency is the wrong instinct.

  3. Build halls, not pages

    Each decade holds the screen while its exhibits move past it, and the decade scrubber is the navigation. Scrolling reads as walking a floor rather than paging a deck, which is the behaviour the subject wanted. The specimen rows keep running horizontally even on a phone — a museum wall does not reflow into a column.

  4. Refuse a soft corner anywhere

    Everything quoted here was printed: posters, manuals, standards documents. A rounded corner is a screen idiom that did not exist for most of the century on display, so there is not one on the site. It is a small decision that keeps the whole thing from looking like a modern product wearing history as a theme.

Credits

Studio
NULL LAB
Services
Brand Identity & Strategy, Website Design & Development
Year
2026
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©2026Brand Identity, Web Design & MultimediaLisboa, PT