category finalist
veronica@stirlingbrandworks.com
For its 10-year anniversary, 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, NH didn’t want a polished gala. It needed a rallying cry to activate its community and to fund what comes next.
We crafted Assembly Required, a campaign grounded in a simple idea: the future of this "smart, earnest, and a little absurd" contemporary art space is one the community must build together.
Then we asked the question: What if a punk zine and an IKEA manual had a civic-minded art baby?
That thinking led to a custom-designed invitation system. Each piece was precision-scored and modular, allowing recipients to physically assemble it into sculptural forms. We worked with a local print partner and a custom paper-scoring vendor to small-batch, test, and finalize the hundreds of stackable invites.
The rest of the system followed that same logic. Bold typography, layered compositions, and intentionally raw graphics created a visual language that felt expressive but controlled.
Through the work we did, over $100,000 was raised, the most successful fundraiser in the non-profit’s decade-long history.
What made this work stand out was how tightly the execution was crafted as a stacked system. Every detail reinforced the same message. If the future needs to be built, you should probably start by putting something in people’s hands.
