In my previous column, I talked about how the initial design presentation is often used as a springboard for dialog: A range of rough solutions may be shown to the design team as a way of stimulating discussion among team members. This can result in one or two ideas that the team wants to see developed further. But in some situations a completely new idea may emerge that is even better than the designer's initial treatments. The important thing to remember is that you shouldn't expect the initial presentation to result in the perfect brand identity for your organization. And in the worst-case scenario, it's back to the drawing board!
But how do you know when you've hit "the sweet spot" and found that unique visual expression of your brand-to-be, the one that will resonate with the greatest number of people? Because decisions in the nonprofit workplace are usually made by consensus, in some ways the task for a nonprofit is simplified: What any one member of the design team loves is irrelevant, unless everybody else is able to "get on board" with it. Buy-in is essential.
"When it works as it's supposed to, consensual decision-making can lead to a stronger brand identity...."
When it works as it's supposed to, consensual decision-making can lead to a stronger brand identity. Because the team, formed of individuals with different perspectives, represents the range of audiences you need to communicate with, when you do come up with an idea that speaks to most, if not all, members of the team, you can be reasonably sure you've found something that will appeal to a broad range of people.
Whatever you do, resist the temptation to share the design presentation with people in the office who aren't members of the design team. Doing so often signals a process that has gone off track and is at risk of failure, and it rarely results in useful feedback for the designer. Here's a rule of thumb I share with all my clients: The designer should be included when any aspect of the design presentation is being discussed. That's because while everyone is asked to look at the same thing, each person invariably sees it differently, and in many cases the designer is the only one who, for purposes of branding, sees it accurately.
Seeing with Our Brains
"Visual" thinkers (a category into which many people fit, including most designers) often make the mistake of thinking others can see what they see. But because we "see" with our brains, not our eyes, any image or design is subject to a range of interpretations. While the visual thinker often sees things that are merely suggested (for example, a face or the shape of an animal in a cloud), the non-visual thinker tends to be more literal (i.e., a cloud is merely a collection of watery particles suspended in the atmosphere). To better illustrate this phenomenon, take a look at the logos in this section. Do you know why BP's new logo resembles a sunflower? Can you find the arrow in the FedEx logo? Did you realize that the GE logo is an abstract representation of a stove burner? And why does it matter?
Bottom line: It's important to pick a logo that does a few essential things equally well.
Recently I went through a presentation with one of my clients, Sisters of Charity of New York, a two-hundred-year-old congregation with an inspiring and courageous history. The tagline the sisters recently adopted, "Living lives of love," is an apt distillation of their collective humility, simplicity, and charity. But the sisters who run the community, as with many senior executives and leaders in the nonprofit sector today, are aging, and the congregation needed to reinvent itself in order to remain vibrant.
There were approximately a dozen people in the meeting, including the two design-firm principals who had been asked to design a new logo for the congregation. By the end of the meeting, the sisters present at the meeting were happy about three of the treatments that had been presented — one featuring overtly religious imagery, the second an elegant but fairly radical abstraction, and the third somewhere in the middle — but were unable to choose one over the others.
Two weeks later, we re-presented to a larger group that included two sisters who had been unable to attend the previous meeting. Something was different this time. For starters, there was more enthusiasm for all three logo treatments than we had heard during the first presentation, even though most of those present were seeing everything for the second time. Then one of the sisters who had not been at the first meeting began, in a soft voice, to explain what she saw in the most daring treatment: A hopeful future and God in the heavens. Amazingly, she also saw a cross where there was only the vaguest suggestion of a cross (clearly, she was a visual thinker!), and the others saw it as soon as she pointed it out.
It was one of those moments when everything gels. For the Sisters of Charity, success in the future will depend on their ability to attract people from all cultures, faiths, and walks of life to their work. Given that reality, it was perhaps better not to incorporate overt religious symbolism in their new brand identity. The sisters in the room understood that, even if only intuitively, and they knew they were stuck on the fence and needed someone from within the congregation, not a hired consultant, to help them get moving, away from what they had always known and toward something new — and energizing.
The atmosphere in the room was electric: People began to respond to the abstract treatment in a more confident way. Soon, new ways to apply it began to flow from those present and in no time a consensus emerged. Any anxiety members of the design team had felt previously disappeared.
As I made my way back to my office, the key lessons of what had happened became clear. First, if you have someone in your organization who has visual acuity and is a team player, do whatever you have to to get them involved in the design process.
"...simplicity is almost always better than complexity...."
Second, simplicity is almost always better than complexity. When I run across a complex, convoluted logo, I imagine someone on the logo committee saying to the designer, "Can you fit a (pick a symbol) in there?" I call it the "kitchen sink" approach to design, and it often comes from a place of insecurity. The logo doesn't have to do everything, it just has to do a few things really well. Try to remember that there are moments in the design process when someone with the respect of the team has to explain that a camel is a horse designed by committee. If the meaning of a symbol is not readily apparent, it may be best to stay with an abstraction or avoid a logo altogether, opting instead for a logotype (i.e., a modified type treatment of your organization's name).
Finally, never forget that, in the largest sense, branding is 90 percent emotionally driven. Your objective is to hit the sweet spot — to find the combination of color, type, and design that feels right to you and your colleagues and which will resonate with your stakeholders and audiences.
Phase Three: Refining the Design
You've wrapped up phase one (research and orientation) and two (design development) of the design process, and now the designer is ready to go away and, based on your feedback, refine the logo.
This part of the process is like a funnel, a kind of narrowing down: you want your new identity to be as close to an exact representation of your organization as possible. Your job is to predict the uses of that identity and to make sure your designer is very clear about what the identity needs to do: You want any surprises to be pleasant ones.
When the designer is finally ready to return with the finished treatment, the presentation will be a bit different. The designer will probably want to show the logo in color and in various sizes, as well as applied to your letterhead and, perhaps, your Web site home page. Any changes at this point should be minute. With a little luck, your new brand identity will start to look real!
This is also the point in the process when you need to examine and revise language that is integral to the brand. In the excitement that comes with a new visual identity, it's sometimes easy to underestimate the degree to which language creates and reinforces audiences' perception of an organization. In fact, the copy writing function is usually an afterthought in nonprofit organizations. Don't make that mistake. Language, like design, is an important expression of the culture and character of your organization. If you can't afford to have a dedicated copy writer on staff, be sure that the people who create copy for you do so according to carefully thought-out guidelines — preferably guidelines that have been put in writing. Does your organization refer to itself in the first or third person? Does it like to present itself as plain-spoken or does it prefer a more authoritative tone? How do you want your audiences, internal as well as external, to refer to the organization? How do you refer to the people who work for or with you (i.e., staff, volunteers)? These are all things you should discuss, design brief in hand, with members of the design team. Remember, everything works to support or defeat the brand. (My next column will go into this in more detail.)
The Importance of Visual Imagery
Although they try, most nonprofits fall short when it comes to using photography (and illustration) to expand and enrich their brands. Partly this is the result of poor planning: An event is scheduled, and everyone is so busy planning it that, when the time comes, they forget to document it. Or the need may not be pending — until, eight months later, when it's time to produce the annual report and staff is left scrambling for images. It's also partly due to a lack of imagination: photos of "talking heads," tonsils in full display, can be deadly dull. On the other hand, if the photographer can capture a candid expression, create a special lighting effect, or imbue the image with a distinct point of view, that same moment may come alive.
The point is, don't leave the visual imagery associated with your brand to chance; it will only weaken the brand and hogtie the designer. Instead, photography (and illustration) can and should be used, with all the collective forethought you can muster, to express the unique character of your organization and to differentiate it from its competitors and peers. Your designer can help with this. He or she should be able to establish broad guidelines for the use of imagery in your materials and be able to hook you up with photographers (and illustrators) capable of producing professional-quality work.
In talking with photographers, remember to be clear about your needs and requirements. A community development organization may want a photographer who excels at street scenes filled with movement, while a different kind of organization may need a photographer who takes powerful studio portraits. In either case, the photographer's portfolio should reflect his or her ability to produce the work required. I can't emphasize this enough: You have to see the work to know whether it will work. Lots of ideas that sound great in meetings fall flat on paper, while some that sound outlandish or even foolish end up being just the ticket.
"As you develop your organization's visual and written vocabulary, it will become clear that what you don't do is as important as what you do do...."
Regardless of the choices you make, do try to be consistent in the application of imagery to your branded materials. Remember, every decision you make has an impact on the overall effectiveness of your brand. As you start to develop your organization's visual and written vocabulary, it will become clear that what you don't do is as important as what you do do. This is when the brand starts to come alive. And once you perfect your stroke, you'll hit that sweet spot each and every time.
In my next column, we'll look at how the brand is applied systematically to meet the needs of the entire organization, and I'll tell you how to develop a buy-in plan. Until then, keep looking!
The Great ABC Logo Bake-Off
Back in the 1980s, my employer at the time, a boutique design studio by the name of Ross Culbert Holland & Lavery, was competing against Landor Associates, the international brand design giant, to redesign the identity of the American Broadcasting Corporation. Landor had committed itself to one logo idea — an exclamation point. On the day of reckoning, our firms presented back-to-back to the logo committee, which was made up of a dozen high-level ABC executives. Roone Arledge, then president of ABC News, killed Landor's presentation with a few well-chosen words: "I can't use that" — the exclamation point — "on the air for the assassination of a president."
Of course, they didn't chose either of our ideas, either, both of which picked up on the "American" in American Broadcast Corporation. (One was an eagle — "NBC already has a bird" — and the other a star — "Too generic. We can't own it.") Unable to decide how to proceed, the committee stayed with the original Paul Rand-designed logo, a circle with the lowercase "abc," which some ABC higher-ups had dubbed "the meatball" — and is still the logo you see on air today.
Years later, I realized that neither Landor nor our firm had been given the opportunity to bring the committee along in its thinking. The only time we met the key decision-makers was the day of the big presentation, and I imagine that most of those on the committee had never thought about, much less been tasked with choosing, a corporate identity. To make matters worse, there was no time built into the process to allow the committee to really examine the ideas presented to it.
Ultimately, eighteen design firms (plus design students from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, who were asked to submit logo ideas for free) were asked to help create a new identity for the network, yet it ended up with nothing, wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and six months in the process, and demoralized a lot of people. All of which earned the project a dubious honorific in the design world — The Great ABC Logo Bake-Off.
PND Nonprofits By Design - DK Holland BioWriter, strategist, and art director DK Holland has been developing award-winning programs that include branding, licensing, promotion, and product development for companies such as Mattel and Citicorp for thirty years. She was, until 2001, a partner in the Pushpin Group, an internationally acclaimed design and illustration firm based in New York City. Currently the principal of DK Holland, llc, a communications consultancy that works exclusively with nonprofits, her clients include the Literacy Assistance Center, New Internationals, the Sustainability Education Center, World Reach, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and Sisters of Charity New York. DK serves on the board of directors of the Alliance for Nonprofit Governance, which she is in the process of re-branding; is an editor ofCommunications Artsmagazine and the author/art director of a dozen books on graphic design; and teaches in the graduate school for nonprofit management at New School University. She lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
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