Happy began it’s life as the pop-up Happy Music Festival in 2010. It has been through several iterations in it’s lifespan- a community driven festival, a series of live shows and campfire sessions while running a great Aussie music blog at the same time. We have been fortunate enough to work with Happy since the beginning and get really excited when they bring us a new idea.

Up until now, Happy has exclusively been the domain of emerging Aussie bands. There is a lot of local talent out there and Happy is in the business of shining a spotlight on it. What the Happy team have discovered in their research however, is that our neighbours over the pond have a lot of kick ass bands doing great things too. So they have made the decision to expand their endless search to include New Zealand as well!

That’s where we came in. Happy asked us to create a sub-brand to differentiate between when they are reporting on Aussie and NZ music. It had to be clearly Happy but with a New Zealand twist. And what is more Kiwi than a moko?

We adapted a traditional moko design to resemble an ‘H’, and then used it in place of the ‘H’ in the Happy logo. This combined with changing the logo to black (the main colour adopted by almost all of New Zealand’s international sporting teams) creates a distinctly Kiwi feel. The logo reveals another facet of Happy, being clearly of the same family but distinctly different at the same time.