Web app and brand identity for 64 Million Artists — a social enterprise on a mission to prove that everyone in Britain is creative.
64 Million Artists exists to challenge a single belief: that creativity belongs to a special few. The brief was to design a web app that could take that argument to scale — building a digital community of people who might never have called themselves artists, and giving them the structure, the challenges, and the social connection to keep coming back.
Five key goals
The project began with a series of workshops with 64 Million Artists and their community, designed to uncover the specific beliefs and frustrations that stopped people from engaging with their own creativity — “it’s too hard”, “there’s no time”, “art is a waste of energy”. From these insights, five concrete design goals emerged: communicate the value of creativity; codify the creative process so anyone could follow it; provide a variety of creative challenges; raise the stakes of participation so users stayed invested; and establish an active, self-sustaining community.
Codifying the creative process
The central design challenge was structural: creativity is inherently open-ended, but the app needed a clear, repeatable process that could guide someone who didn’t know where to start. Working with the 64 Million Artists team, that process was distilled into four steps — Pledge, Do, Think, Share — which became simultaneously the app’s navigation, its brand language, and its core call-to-action.
User journey
The four steps mapped directly to distinct moments in the creative experience. Users began by pledging time — a micro-commitment that made participation feel achievable. They then defined or picked a creative challenge to complete independently. On returning, they were prompted to reflect on the experience before uploading and sharing their work with the community. Each step addressed a specific barrier identified in the research: time anxiety, creative paralysis, lack of motivation, and isolation.
High-fidelity wireframes
Rather than moving straight to visual design, high-fidelity wireframes were built and tested with 64 Million Artists’ most active community members. Testing at this stage — before colour, illustration or brand identity were applied — meant structural problems could be identified and fixed without the cost of rebuilding a polished UI. Insights from each round were fed directly back into the next iteration.
User interface design
The UI palette was developed in parallel with the brand identity — each informing the other. The four-step journey gave the visual system its architecture: each stage has its own colour, its own typographic treatment, its own emotional register. The result is an interface that feels playful and energetic without sacrificing the clarity the journey requires.
The first creative challenge
Every artist signs their work. So the first creative challenge given to every new user was to sign the 64 Million Artists logo with their own handwriting — producing a unique, personalised version of the brand on their first visit. It was a piece of product design that worked as both onboarding mechanic and brand statement: the moment you joined, you were already an artist.
A brand identity that grows with its community
Because every user signs the logo in their own hand, no two versions are identical. The brand identity becomes a direct reflection of the community it represents — and as the community grows, so does the range and character of the mark. It is, by design, a living identity: more interesting, more human, and more true to the organisation’s mission with every new artist who joins.
