Since October 2023, Australia’s Jewish community has reported a 700% spike in antisemitic incidents. Now more than ever, we can’t afford to let the lessons of the past be forgotten.

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) is home to more than 1,500 survivor testimonies and over 20,000 Holocaust artefacts. As we approach 75 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the tragedy of the Holocaust feels more distant and less relevant. With the younger generations showing less interest, it is becoming harder to pass on the legacy and lessons of the survivors. As more time passes the Holocaust becomes easier to dismiss as something from a different world with no relevance to their current lives.

Our brief was to develop a new, modern visual identity for MHM to help the museum connect with a younger audience.

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum was founded by survivors, from the front room of a survivor’s home in Melbourne – which remains part of the museum’s physical space today. This courageous endeavour, collecting testimony and undeniable proof of the atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust, was originally funded and driven by the survivors themselves, many of whom were still recovering from deep trauma.

It’s for these reasons that the MHM’s look and feel, logo and visual identity guidelines were somewhat dated and unstructured. The survivors' focus was on sharing these important stories and less on design craft. But with the museum going through a significant refurbishment, it was time to create a more modern visual identity to compliment the new physical space.

We needed to engage a younger audience, while ensuring the survivors and their messages of hope remained at the core of the brand world we built.

So, we moved away from the visual tropes of the Holocaust like barbed wire, chimneys, and stripes, and instead created a brighter, more optimistic visual language. Highlighting for young people, the light that can emanate from darkness and the positivity and incredible value that is innate in our survivors and their stories of triumph over unimaginable adversity.

Our new visual identity is based on the idea of fragmentation. The missing fragments represent the lives and culture lost in the Holocaust, while the remaining fragments honour the survivors, who pieced together their memories and knowledge to pass on the lessons of the Holocaust for generations to come. Helping to build a brighter future, piece by piece.

Our visual identity was rolled out across every touchpoint, in both the physical world and the digital world. From wayfinding and visualisations in the physical Museum space, advertising panels both inside and outside of the Museum, the Museum website, printed collateral, social channels and posts. It was used to refresh the biannual magazine, which we renamed Voices, as well as corporate comms, and paid placements in magazines and transit media.

The relaunch of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum resulted in 1,169 pieces of media coverage with 24,614,559 total audience reach and $10m of value. The launch of our new visual identity also drove significant uplifts for our all-important social channels - a focus for us as these channels are critical communication touchpoints for younger Australians. Our newly redesigned look and feel across our social channels and posts drove a 71% increase in total audience, a 145% increase in engagements and a 148% increase in post clicks. This means we have seen a 277% increase in website users and a 285% increase in conversions since the launch of our new design toolkit.