Cass Art: Turning Material Stories into a Brand Experience
1. A brand story connecting art and chemistry
Cass Art’s King’s Cross store tells the story of an art materials specialist through the substances that make up famous paintings.
- Fourteen paintings are represented by their titles, artists’ names and line drawings of their actual frames, accompanied by the chemical formulas and molecular structures of key pigments.
- Turner’s work is connected to yellow ochre, and Vermeer’s to ultramarine.
- The composition begins with familiar paintings and shifts attention to the substances behind their colors. It gives the art materials on display the context of how artworks are made.
- From a branding perspective, this is a choice to turn knowledge of materials into stories customers can discover. It demonstrates the brand’s expertise through specific content.
2. Environmental graphics that make room for products and stories
A monochrome frieze extending more than 30 meters shapes both the impression of the space and the experience of reading information.
- Bold typography combines with precise technical lines, molecular structures and illustrations of artists’ tools to express the scientific character of the materials visually.
- The restrained monochrome graphics establish a hierarchy with the colorful products below. The walls carry the story, while the displays give color its presence.
- From a distance, the graphics create a visual rhythm connecting the store; up close, visitors can read about the relationship between paintings and pigments. The information people discover changes with viewing distance, giving the spatial experience a distinctive quality.
3. Extending an existing identity into a new experience
The theme of materials adds a story specific to King’s Cross to familiar typography.
- The design continues Cass Art’s existing typographic expression while broadening its graphic range through chemical structures and line drawings.
- A tote bag celebrating the opening also features a pigment-themed design, connecting the store’s story to an object people can carry with them.
- This project shows how to decide together which visual language to retain and which story to extend. It is a useful reference for considering brand consistency alongside the character of a place.
