Young V&A
Young V&A
The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, home to collections unmatched in breadth and depth. Rooted in South Kensington for over 150 years, the organisation has been undergoing significant expansion. Now comprising of five UK venues—V&A South Kensington, Young V&A, V&A East, V&A Dundee—and an increasing number of international initiatives.
With this growth came a clear challenge: how to create distinction between venues while ensuring they each contribute to a unified mission, ensuring each site had its own voice within a connected brand family.
Studio
Created as part of Team Willer at Pentagram
Deliverables
Visual Identity
Type Design
Illustration
Guidelines and Toolkits
Design System
Young V&A today
Formerly the Museum of Childhood, Young V&A reopened in Bethnal Green as a bold reinvention of what a children’s museum can be. Its mission is to nurture imagination, play and design, offering an active, participatory environment that reflects the rich diversity of East London and its young visitors.
A brand that invites play
The new identity needed to resonate with a broader, more diverse audience—spanning ages, cultures and levels of creative confidence. The guiding idea was simple but powerful: ‘Sparking Creativity’. Everything—from type to motion to tone—was crafted to feel expressive, hands-on and joyfully imperfect.
A key element of the identity was a series of playful interventions into the museum’s custom Spiller typeface. By combining its Extrabold weight with hand-drawn character variants, the team created a living, participatory typographic voice—cheeky, energetic and unmistakably made for young people. The development and refinement of these typographic behaviours was crafted to ensure a balanced spontaneity with usability across applications.
In motion, the type comes alive. Characters shift between handmade and structured forms in a stop-motion rhythm that mirrors children’s own creativity—messy, exploratory, and full of discovery.
A toolkit built for participation
Hand-drawn illustrations, a vibrant colour palette and a photography style inspired by lo-tech zine culture complete the system. To support the participatory nature of the brand, we also developed a library of doodles and drawn elements that can be picked up, remixed and reinterpreted across the museum’s communications.
The verbal identity centres on the idea of being ‘Seriously Spirited’—capturing the museum’s belief in the importance of creativity while expressing it with warmth, confidence and enthusiasm.
A museum for the future
Young V&A demonstrates how a museum can actively empower the next generation of makers, thinkers and designers. The new identity gives the museum a lively, characterful and accessible voice—one equipped to engage an expanding audience and inspire creativity for years to come.
In just its first year after reopening, Young V&A’s bold, playful repositioning was recognised with one of the biggest honours by winning the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024.
This accolade underlines how the new brand identity—not just visually, but culturally—has helped turn the museum into a truly inspiring space. By centering creativity, participation, and community engagement, the revitalised Young V&A now stands as both a beacon for young people and a powerful example of what a modern, joyous museum can achieve.
