Art Fund

Art Happens

A flexible sub-brand system enabling museums to run distinct campaigns within a shared framework

Developed while freelancing in-house at Art Fund, working with the Head of Design and Marketing Manager

Brand identity | Sub-brand system | Toolkit design

A collection of promotional materials, including a large poster, a postcard, two circular stickers, and a folded pamphlet, all advertising a crowdfunding campaign for Jerwood Gallery featuring a black and white art print of animals in space and text about supporting the project.

Art Happens is Art Fund's crowdfunding platform for museums and galleries. The existing identity lacked flexibility. It had a visual language that raised awareness of the platform, but created challenges for individual institutions to tell their own story within it. This resulted in inconsistent outputs and low confidence among the non-design teams using it.

An illustration of a horse on a train with a rider, surrounded by a race track and a group of runners pulling the train, promoting a charitable event to help the horse reach the top of a hill in one day, with the hashtag #YayNotNeigh.
An illustration of a horse on a train with a rider, surrounded by a race track and a group of runners pulling the train, promoting a charitable event to help the horse reach the top of a hill in one day, with the hashtag #YayNotNeigh.
Interior ceiling of a historic building with ornate gold decorations and a painted ceiling mural.
An illustration of a woman with dark hair, red lipstick, and tattoos, wearing a fur coat and holding a fluffy white animal, with a golden halo behind her head, on a gray background. Text above and beside her reads: "Jewish Museum London," "Art Happens _ with Art Fund," and "Put Amy's Camden on the map."
An illustration of a woman with dark hair, red lipstick, and tattoos, wearing a fur coat and holding a fluffy white animal, with a golden halo behind her head, on a gray background. Text above and beside her reads: "Jewish Museum London," "Art Happens _ with Art Fund," and "Put Amy's Camden on the map."

The identity was redefined as a modular, toolkit-led system, not a single campaign look, but a framework designed to be flexible enough to be adapted by all museums creating their crowdfunding campaigns. It established a clear typographic hierarchy, adaptable colour and layout components, and a more direct tone of voice, so campaign teams with no design background could apply it confidently themselves.

The system was built from a shared grid: a fixed logo lockup and tagline position, with campaign colour, imagery, and copy left flexible, so each museum's output looks distinctly theirs while remaining unmistakably Art Happens. It operates seamlessly across print, digital, and social applications, from posters and table talkers through to Instagram assets and rewards packaging.

The result is a cohesive yet flexible framework, adopted by over 40 museums and galleries across the UK, enabling distinct institutional voices while maintaining a strong, consistent brand presence. Art Happens has helped raise over £1.5m for arts projects nationally.

A display featuring four colorful vertical banners fundraising for an art exhibition, with messages about Joe Orton, Paula Rego, and a Black Panther illustration.
Three cylindrical cans with different colors and text, arranged side by side on a gray background.
Two blue boxes with white text and logo, one of which is taller and has the text "with Art Fund", the other shorter with the text "Dovecot Studios".
Stack of four books with colorful covers on a light gray surface.
Four colorful rectangular boxes, in pink, blue, purple, and light pink, are floating against a light gray background. Each box has the phrase '_with Art Fund' and 'Art Happens_' printed on them in white text.

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