When the Museum of Contemporary Art brought us in for their Spring 2026 campaign, we began where good strategy always does: with what came before. Working through years of existing marketing material, we identified the elements that were landing — and built from there. The result is a design system and suite of flexible templates the Museum's small internal team can actually use, with enough structure to stay consistent and enough room to stay creative.

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The campaign deliverables span the full media mix: out-of-home placements, transit shelter ads, magazine and newspaper ads, social media assets, and posters sold in the Museum shop. The work is modern in feel and deeply rooted in contemporary art's visual language — which is exactly where it should be for a museum of this calibre.

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Branding for museums comes with a particular kind of pressure. The institution has a voice, a history, and an audience with high visual literacy. Design that feels generic or safe doesn't just underperform — it actively undermines the work on the walls. Our job was to create a system rigorous enough to protect the brand and flexible enough to serve whatever the season brings.

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Working with a lean internal team meant the templates needed to be genuinely handoff-ready — not just beautiful in presentation, but usable in practice. That's a different kind of design challenge, and one we take seriously.

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