You're Kind

Art Fund

Art Happens

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

Brand identity, sub-brand system, toolkit design

Art Happens is Art Fund's crowdfunding platform for museums and galleries. The existing identity lacked flexibility: a strong visual language that raised awareness of the platform but left little room for individual institutions to tell their own story within it, resulting 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.

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."

The identity was redefined as a modular, toolkit-led system, not a single campaign look, but a framework built to be reused and adapted across every campaign a museum runs. 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, campaign after campaign.

The system was built from a shared grid: a fixed logo lockup and tagline position, with campaign colour, imagery, and copy length 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 reward 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.