SFMOMA Sans

Commissioning and directing a custom accessible typeface to unify a decade-old brand system

Design Direction

In 2016, I was part of the SFMOMA Design Studio team that developed the museum's original type system — SFMOMA Display and SFMOMA Text, designed by Christoph Koeberlin alongside our new logo and identity. That system carried the brand for nearly a decade.

By 2024, accessibility audits told us it wasn't working for everyone. The geometric forms that made the identity distinctive — tight counters, near-perfect circles, subtle distinctions between characters like I, l, and 1 — were exactly what made it hard to read for visitors with low vision or dyslexia. Typography either tells a visitor you belong here, or it tells them this isn't for you. Ours was doing the latter for some of our audience, without anyone intending it to.

I wrote the brief and commissioned type designer Olivia King to design a single unified family to replace both Display and Text — one typeface built on accessibility-focused foundations, differentiated enough to stay distinctly SFMOMA, and versatile enough to work across signage, publications, and screens.

The work
Across several rounds, Olivia and I worked through hundreds of decisions balancing legibility against identity — where to soften geometry for readability, where to keep enough character that the museum's typographic voice stayed recognizable. One I'm particularly proud of: the uppercase Q. At small sizes, a Q can be mistaken for an O — a real problem on wayfinding signage where a visitor might be scanning quickly. We gave SFMOMA's Q a tail that crosses further into the bowl, disambiguating it at a glance without breaking the letterform's character.

In the world
SFMOMA Sans soft-launched with Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10, the same reinstallation where our team was piloting tactile maps, touch objects, and accessible seating. The typeface became the throughline connecting that R&D to a museum-wide standard, now rolling out across signage, publications, and digital platforms.

Read the full account in SFMOMA's own coverage of the project, and see Olivia King's type design process.