Case Study: MOCA LA transforms museum navigation with Base Design

MOCA LA brings nearly 50 years of museum history into a simpler digital experience with Base Design

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA LA) required a digital experience that reflected its unique, artist-founded history and navigated its split-campus identity without overwhelming the art it showcases. The challenge was to avoid the typical cluttered museum website structure and instead create an intuitive, mobile-first platform that felt authentic to the institution. Base Design was tasked with developing a digital strategy and product design that pushed the existing brand identity into a functional interface.

Base Design's solution ingeniously utilized the core geometric shapes from MOCA's iconic 1984 logo, transforming the circle and square into the primary navigation elements. This approach created a consistent digital grammar across all screen sizes, simplifying the user journey and placing more focus on the art. The result was a website where identity and interface became one, making the digital experience feel unmistakably like MOCA without requiring a visual reinvention.

MOCA LA