MIT Sloan School of Management

Getting Bold
with Binary Code

MIT Sloan School of Management | Cambridge, MA

The MIT Sloan School of Management is a globally recognized institution that promotes innovation and learning through technology and business. Their influence gathers audiences both on-site at the Cambridge, MA campus and on-line through social media and website articles. While keeping the strong institutional brand, MIT Sloan wanted a fresher set of identity elements around the “Ideas Made to Matter” platform, highlighting alumni, faculty, and student work.

Before & After Shots.

The LLM team was engaged to design physical and digital items that seamlessly created a cohesive experience with a human centric approach. The final visual concept experimented with the interplay of color, rhythm, and interactive reveals through a system of Binary Code. Solids, voids, and depth dimensions were assigned as a code. Within Sloan’s lobby space there was an opportunity to update existing promotional graphics and engage a variety of audience types along a three wall corridor and double height space.

A new, large, lit, tone-on-tone sign welcomes visitors from campus into the building. The existing wood slat ceiling influenced our use of wood slats as the main surface on the three walls. Bold brand colors provide pops of energy, emphasizing moving graphics on digital screens from a live feed of online material. As the visitor walks along the corridor, large-scale letters unfold to spell “IDEAS”, while the varying depths of wood undulate with rhythm.

The third wall opens into the double height space and invites visitors to explore additional ideas through an 86” touchscreen. Collaborating with Trivium Interactive and Perkins School for the Blind, the screen allows for multiple visitors to explore and engage.

The visual concept continued with the build-out of branded elements including on-site banners, presentations, and social media templates, an updated icon library,
and a new identity standards guideline book.