Louis Vuitton: REcreative

ID, art direction, interface design and a whole lot of thinking for a new young artists' community.

We started scoping this project out way back in September 2010, and it finally went live in June 2011. It's a revolutionary new community for young artists, launched in partnership with Louis Vuitton, and the South London Gallery, and making it was, to put it nicely, a journey.

The best thing about the project was the fact that the people who'll actually be using it - young artists - were involved right the way through. We had to pitch the project to various industry experts (like Jefferson Hack) throughout the process, but the kids weren't just there for show - we collaborated through a project blog and a load of co-creation sessions to develop more or less everything about the project's look, from the logo to the typefaces.

As a result, the homepage is pretty mental (but not in a bad way); the galleries created loads of great content for the site, so it's all about giving people as many routes into it as possible.

The name and logo all started from an idea the kids had about crowdsourcing - they really saw the potential for the community to allow them to share ideas and collaborate in a new way.

My response was to design the first part of the logo as an anchor, and the second part as a sort of canvas for contributors to design themselves. It's working out really well - we got the kids to come up with loads of versions to prove the concept, and once the site's established they'll start appearing on rotation in the header.

You can read more about the development of the brand on the site, if that's your thing.

Louis Vuitton sure know how to launch a website. They left a giant shipping container emblazoned with the logo in the middle of Covent Garden, and got some high-profile arty types (like Tracey Emin, Sophie Dahl, Sam Taylor-Wood and Michael Landy) to make their own versions of the logo on t-shirts.

The project's had great media coverage - it's been featured in Dazed Digital, New Media Age, the Telegraph and, weirdly, the India Times, among others.

Have a look for yourself! It's literally quite good.