Homepage & Brand Voice | The Momentary
Helping the Momentary find its voice
Originally conceived as a contemporary art-focused satellite to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Momentary has struggled to make an identity for itself since it opened in 2020.
Blessed with a cool physical space, strong visual branding, and a killer lineup of events, exhibitions, and festivals, what the Momentary needed was a voice.
Staff and stakeholders knew that “the MO” was the cool, trendy sibling of the institution. It just needed to sound like it when it spoke.
So, in advance of the House Party that accompanied our new exhibitions and a post-remodel reopening, we looked at how to express that energy on one of the most visible touchpoints we could: the homepage.
I had been the main copywriter over Momentary projects, with a firm sense of how to put the voice that had grown organically over time into action, so the rewrite fell to me. Few.io had provided a fantastic design, so all that was needed was the copy.
The Momentary Homepage
The first thing that needed to go was the jargon. Rather than introducing the MO as a “satellite contemporary art space”, I wanted to lean into a descriptive phrase used by one of the Momentary’s founders, Olivia Walton, as well as our PR team: the MO was a “hub for creativity.”
Next, we needed to capture the “cool” energy while still holding to the institutional mission of welcoming all. For that, friendly and direct declaritive sentences captured some of the descriptors our team came up with while pitching our most recent ad campaign: Friendly, cool, conversational, witty, direct. A first-person rewrite, little bits of natural language like “we’re into it,” a twist on our signature sign-off “See you there,” and slightly imperfect grammar all helped establish a casual tone.
Highlighting the history and versatility of the space was also a major messaging priority. So, we wove in some of the MO’s own story and highlighted the range of offerings.
Last, we wanted to create continuity with the ad campaign, which was a modular concept presenting the MO as a third space: “Your Place to ___”, where the blank was filled in by action words. Since I had served as “copy chief” alongside the lead writer for that campaign, helping set tone, conceptual direction, and signing off on ad copy, we had ample headlines to draw from.
All together, the new homepage told you
Where you were
Who we were
What you could expect when you got here
And what we were like.
And that, for us, was success. Scroll down to see the re-write in action for yourself, or check out the latest version of the page in the wild.
