London Transport Museum

A partnership with the London Transport Museum to create a contemporary, unified and distinctive visual identity system for their retail offer. Leaning into their rich design history and multitude of products and touch points, we worked together to create an instantly recognisable identity that unites their offer from Museum to home.

The London Transport Museum had a sizable challenge: A vast number of products, aimed at four different audiences, each with a different feel and each telling a different story – all displayed under one impressive roof, in Covent Garden.

People visit the shop independently (or online) and it often forms part of a trip to the Museum. It’s part of a charitable institution that’s working to preserve and share the story of London Transport for future generations. All profits made in the shop go back into supporting their mission.

The Museum team felt that the retail experience had become disjointed and lacked a crucial story-telling element. They tasked us with bringing the transport story to life while embedding a cohesive visual identity system into the store.

From the tube map to eclectic ‘this way’ signage, illustrative arrows, moquette seat patterns and the iconic roundel logo, we had a wealth of original, historic and quintessentially ‘London’ design elements to work with. Our ambition was to tell the story of London Transport in a way that was relevant to each carefully selected product that the shop sells.

Hands-on exploration, including visiting the Museum depot to look at archive parts of the network, tracing bus maps, and researching iconic landmarks for each tube route, meant we could create a visual identity system to flex and unify the retail offer.

By illustrating a library of graphic tiles that work together uniquely on each product, we tell the story of London Transport through design. These tiles, paired with the Johnston typeface and iconic London Transport colours, become instantly recognisable as London.

From socks to trains, mugs to sofas, each product is curated by the LTM team. The flexible visual identity enables each disparate product to become part of a unified system that educates, surprises and delights, from the Museum, to the shelf, to home.

With sustainability a key focus for the Museum, the visual identity system encourages best practice, such as removing plastic windows, introducing kraft boxes and displaying reusable peg boards for POS.

With an ever-changing product range, a sustainable focus and mission to celebrate and preserve the iconic story of London Transport, our visual identity system is built to last.