Mural Arts Philadelphia
Four Disciplines, One Voice
Since 2022, our work for Mural Arts Philadelphia has spanned publications, milestone identity, seasonal campaigns, and fundraising mail. Four distinct disciplines built around one recognizable brand voice. The projects touch different parts of the organization, from communications to development, but the throughline is consistent: systems built to work across formats and hold up over time.
For the organization's seasonal catalogs and annual reports, we created a tiered short-sheet system (each department section opening on a page cut shorter than the last, forming a visible tab along the edge) that gave both publications an intuitive way to navigate dense programmatic content. In the annual reports, the same system doubles as narrative: donor, partner, and board listings open on a mural in progress and close on the finished work, a quiet metaphor for what funders make possible. Color follows the featured artwork rather than a fixed department key, keeping the palette alive from issue to issue.
For the organization's 40th anniversary, working from a theme already set by the communications team, Roots & Reimagination, we built a complete anniversary logo system: a primary mark, badge, logomark, and abbreviated bug, anchored by a custom illustration combining Philadelphia's architecture, human figures, and the wave pattern from the organization's existing mark. A set of celebratory neon accents extended the brand's blue without overwhelming it, and animated versions of the logo carried the identity into social media and leadership presentations throughout the year.
For Mural Arts Month, the organization's month-long October celebration, we designed the full campaign. For 2025's Voices of Philly theme, that meant a street banner announcing the celebration across the city, postcards, digital billboards and ads along with a suite of social media graphics for mural tours, panel discussions, and special events, built around bold illustrative artwork drawn from the season's featured murals.
For the Annual Fund, we designed a trifold mailer paired with a reply envelope and business reply card built around the line "Public art is a reflection of us." One recent mailing centered on The Living Tree, a youth-designed mural at the Rumph/Mallory Recreation Center, using that story to make the case for what donor support makes possible in neighborhoods across the city.
Across all four, the same approach applies: build a system flexible enough to hold multiple formats and moments, while keeping everything recognizably part of one brand.