Branding, Visual identity
WEBSITE
tour.florence.it
An academic exploration in heritage branding, Florence's oldest medieval tower, reimagined.
The Museo della Pagliazza sits inside one of Florence's oldest surviving medieval towers, a building with Roman foundations, a medieval prison past, and a collection of ceramic fragments excavated from the site itself. The brief for this academic project was to build a visual identity that could hold all of that history without making it feel dusty, and make the museum speak to a younger generation without losing what makes it extraordinary.
Heritage institutions face a common identity trap: lean too far into history and you alienate younger audiences; lean too far into modernity and you lose the very thing that makes you worth visiting. The Museo della Pagliazza needed an identity that could bridge that gap, grounded in the archaeology and architecture of the site, but alive enough to feel relevant today.
The ceramic fragments excavated from inside the tower became the creative foundation. I built a modular visual language inspired by broken shards, fragmented shapes that reference the actual artefacts while creating a flexible graphic system that works across signage, print, tickets, bags, and digital platforms. The "P" from Pagliazza was reclaimed as the logo mark, reconstructed from ceramic-like fragments to make the typography itself feel archaeological. A warm, vibrant colour palette, terracotta, amber, deep stone, grounds the identity in the materials and tones of the site itself.
The central idea is fragmented continuity. The museum celebrates broken things, shards, fragments, pieces of a lost world, and the design honours that literally. But where the ceramics are broken, the identity brings them together. Every fragment has a place in the system. The result is a brand that feels like it was always part of the building, as if you excavated it from the same ground as the artefacts inside.
This was an academic exploration project, not a commissioned brief. All concepts are original and created independently.
