Case 20 / 20
Muse
Museum software that had to look like it belonged in the museum.
- Sector
- Museum Software · SaaS
- Scope
- Discovery · Brand Strategy · Brand · Website
- Design
- Gev Marotz
Muse runs the whole back office of a museum in one place: ticketing, memberships, fundraising, the gift shop till, events and the reports a board asks for. Its buyers had spent years on generic nonprofit software stitched together through integrations, and most of them had stopped expecting anything better.
Software nobody in the building would mistake for the building
Museum software tends to look like enterprise software, because that's what it is underneath. A director who spends the day among objects chosen with great care is then asked to buy a grey dashboard.
Muse was asking museums to move every system they run at once. That's a hard decision to make on a product that looks like the thing it's replacing.
Put the name on a plinth
Discovery and a brand strategy came first, then two rounds of concepts. The direction Muse chose was sleek and visionary, with rich, cinematic imagery.
The wordmark stands on a stepped base, the shape every object in a gallery is displayed on. It reduces to a single M on the same steps for the places a full name won't fit, and it turns the company's name into an exhibit.
A gallery, not a feature list
The website was laid out like a gallery: large type, one idea per section, objects given space. Grey type carries the setup and black carries the claim, so each headline reads as a turn from the old way to the new one.
The objects are the museum's own: a painted ceiling behind the sign-up form, a chained angel under “Outdated software is holding you back”, an aquarium for the one-platform pitch. Every section was designed for a phone as well as a desktop.
Into the round
Muse took the brand and the story into its $4.5M seed round, led by Roo Capital.
Muse's team has since built its current website itself. The pages shown here are our original design.
Gev has a rare talent for pulling my ideas out of my head and bringing them to life in ways I couldn’t have imagined on my own. He translates vision into reality in a timely manner, and the results always blow me away.
Travis Fuller, Founder & CEO, Muse Software
