Hauser & Wirth

BOROS × Hauser & Wirth [2018–2020]
Art Direction Design system refresh focused on clarity and operational handover — making the brand ready for independent, in-house application
Hauser & Wirth had grown into a global enterprise before its visual identity had a chance to keep up. Founded in 1992 by Manuela and Iwan Wirth and Ursula Hauser, the gallery had expanded from its origins to spaces in London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and St. Moritz — each location accumulating its own visual logic along the way. Without a shared design strategy or guidelines, consistency had quietly eroded across print, digital, and every language and cultural context the brand now operated in.
The task was to change that — and to do so in a way that would last. Rather than producing another round of agency output, the goal was to build something the organisation could own: a coherent visual identity with clear principles, robust enough to travel across geographies and media, and structured to be managed in-house. Design, branding, and communications — brought under one roof, on the client side.

New Transport replaces Transport D — the typeface originally engineered in the 1960s for British motorway signage. The switch wasn’t cosmetic. With print and webfont availability built in from the start, New Transport secured a consistent typographic presence across every medium the brand touched, with full support for extended Latin and Eastern European character sets. For a gallery operating across six countries and multiple languages, that kind of typographic infrastructure isn’t a detail — it’s a precondition for coherence.

Every global exhibition programme was brought into a unified print system. Opening reception invites, save-the-dates, dinner invites, posters, wall signage — all resolved within the same visual logic, regardless of location or artist. The challenge at this scale isn’t design — it’s structure. Templates, clear decisions made upstream, and a system flexible enough to absorb individual exhibition identities without losing coherence.

The annual Art Basel presentation demanded a different register: an art fair catalogue alongside print and digital invites calibrated to the context — precise, considered, befitting the audience. The digital and print versions were developed in parallel, maintaining visual coherence across formats rather than treating one as an adaptation of the other.

Building on the success of the Art Basel catalogue, a second publication was developed for the annual Frieze Masters presentation — with the same level of production ambition.

The full stationery suite was realigned to the updated identity. Beyond visual consistency, the focus was operational: a range of templates introduced to reduce friction and support an in-house team managing communications across multiple offices and time zones.

The recurring invitation card format was migrated to digital — not simply adapted, but reconsidered for the medium. The result respected the visual integrity of the broader web presence while addressing the practical demands of responsive design.

The opening campaign for Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz — inaugurated with a Louise Bourgeois exhibition — called for a distinct visual gesture. Colour, applied with deliberate boldness, marked the occasion as exceptional: a new space, a significant artist, a moment worth announcing — setting the tone for the location from day one.

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