Description:

Art & Creativity + Youth + Mental Health = With Wonder

Art therapy boxes that promote mental wellbeing through a self-directed therapeutic experience, and are grounded in the real-world practice of art therapists and psychotherapists.

Our client Breathing Space, a registered NZ charity, came to us with an early-stage concept. Founded in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2016, Breathing Space provides free, trauma-informed therapy and group programs to young people, with a focus on those facing systemic barriers to wellbeing.

Alongside the founder, Asha Munn — the only registered art psychotherapist in Aotearoa, EMDR therapist, and a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts — this project was born as a result of lockdown. When the Breathing Space team could no longer meet the growing demand for services, they adapted by preparing makeshift care packages with art materials — the ‘art box’ quickly became a vehicle for offering support to youth in times of need.

We helped bring With Wonder to life as a product system; using art as a medium for improved mental wellness.

With Wonder is the belief that art and creativity can have a transformative effect on the mental health of at-risk youth in Aotearoa.

Each With Wonder box is designed in collaboration with a different NZ artist — with the likes of Lissy and Rudi, Jade Townsend, and Te Ara Minhinnik featured in the first releases.

Our challenge was to create a visual identity that was clinically-backed but approachable to our target audience of primarily underprivileged youth. On its own, the visual identity had to communicate creativity, even when segregated from the artists’ work. Unlike the white walls of the gallery space, it had to be art in and of itself.

The design for With Wonder celebrates individuality, empowers self expression, is fluid, gestural, and ever-evolving, allows for co-creation, is open (never closed), is an ongoing discovery, and invites all to create With Wonder.

The result is a series of design assets which form a compelling visual identity; a welcoming colour palette, a custom hand-drawn typeface ‘Wonder’, a set of expressive emojis that feature a range of open-ended feelings, and a robust packaging system that will allow non-for-profit Breathing Space to collaborate with an array of Aotearoa’s artists, without the cost of printing custom boxes each release.

We dream of a world where healthcare practitioners and medical professionals prescribe art and creativity, in different forms, to care for our mental health; a world where self expression and healing through art & creativity can happen everyday, across Aotearoa.