It’s no secret I’m a fan of Johnson Banks, so I won’t go on about their recent Science Museum identity apart from stating that obviously, I loved it. If you want to see more of it click here.

No, I’m writing this because I noticed something the other morning as I passed an advert in the tube station.

One of the things designers love to do is line things up. Whenever I get a new identity brief, I often size up the name of the company, looking for symmetries, interesting gaps between letters, double entendres etc etc. All very Smile in the Mind. Anyway, I digress. One thing I often do is work out it the letters will stack nicely, so I liked the fact that the new Science Museum logo does that.

4 letters, 6, or best of all, 9 letters are all a gift. Except that there are 13 letters in S C I E N C E M U S E U M, and my OCD gene means I know that’s a prime number, so it doesn’t work. And then I noticed, they’ve run the I and the E together on the first line. Clever buggers.

Normally that wouldn’t work at all, but it works so well I hadn’t even noticed it.