Foam, Amsterdam’s celebrated pictures museum, has revealed a refreshed model id and visible system designed by Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The overhaul establishes a unified look throughout the museum’s bodily, digital, and editorial platforms – together with its iconic Foam Journal – whereas reasserting its twin want to be deeply rooted in Amsterdam whereas remaining international in ambition.
For a museum lengthy identified for pushing pictures’s boundaries, this evolution was each philosophical and visible. Wieden+Kennedy’s transient was to search out coherence between Foam’s a number of identities – comparable to its gallery, publication, and rising on-line presence – with out dulling the inventive friction that defines it.
The reply lay within the museum’s identify itself. The wordmark ‘Foam’, initially a fusion of ‘Fotografiemuseum’ and ‘Amsterdam’, grew to become the inspiration of the brand new system.
Visually, it splits and reconnects, embodying the strain between native roots and international attain. “The brand new id challenges the viewer with unconventional approaches the place clear hierarchy coexists with rigidity and disruption,” says the design workforce. They describe the look as editorial and typographic, explaining how the design language brings the journal’s distinctive vitality again into the museum’s wider model.
Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam’s design director, Alex Thursby-Pelham, notes that the undertaking held a particular resonance. She says: “Foam is an Amsterdam cultural spotlight for everybody within the design workforce, so to have the ability to collaborate with them was an absolute dream.
“To have the ability to join with the town we stay and work in by this undertaking made it much more particular.”
A key element of the brand new id is movement, which is now a defining factor of Foam’s visible language for the primary time. The design workforce launched ideas of ‘Resisting Circulation’ and ‘Angular Pressure’ to convey a way of deliberate, photographic friction to the model’s motion.
Reasonably than clean transitions or normal animations, the system performs with pause and readability, echoing the act of viewing a nonetheless picture. The refreshed id made its debut by visuals for Blommers & Schumm: Mid-Air, presently on present at Foam till February 2026.
The redesign additionally coincides with the launch of the worldwide marketing campaign for Foam Expertise 2026 – the museum’s platform for rising image-makers. Developed by W+Okay’s Design Studio and artistic accelerator programme The Kennedys, the marketing campaign channels the brand new model ideas right into a constellation-like visible narrative.
Every pin on the marketing campaign map represents a voice inside Foam’s worldwide community, captured below the highly effective name to motion: “Let the world see what you see.”
Foam’s head of selling and communications, Irene Bakker, mentioned the refresh represents a pivotal second within the museum’s evolution. She says: “This model refresh displays Foam’s ongoing evolution, uniting our museum, journal, and digital platforms below one cohesive id that embodies how we have interaction with pictures immediately.
“With movement now central to our design, the id merges pictures and design in expressive, modern methods – reaffirming our perception in pictures’s energy to problem, encourage, and join.”
The rebrand has now rolled out throughout Foam’s bodily areas, on-line platforms, and out-of-home media in Amsterdam.
