This was a side project for everyone involved. That meant we had to make every minute together count.
The nonprofit mental health sector is crowded, so we put a lot of time into thinking about differentiation.
We played a delicate dance, silmoltaneously branding, finding our audience, and fleshing out the idea.
We started with competitive research to address challenge #2. We analyzed 9 mental health story collections online for how they used language and images to communicate their message. We decided what we wanted to change—and what we wanted to copy.
Using tools like Zoom, we were able to conduct a completely remote retreat. Group reflections, reading in pairs, silent voting—we used a variety of tools and approaches to make workshops accessible for people with different communication styles. I helped facilitate the development of CF’s mission/vision/values, team roles, and two-year business plan.
I believe strongly in the power of divergent thinking, rapid generation, and minimum viable products. For logo sketching, I started with visual research around aviation + health. Then, I wrote down dozens of ways I might combine them: chat bubble in globe, wings in map pin, etc.
For this project, I checked back in with my client when I got down to my top five logos. We iterated from there. Here are some early versions of our picks.
Once we got down to our top two logos, we knew we were facing a hard choice: one logo was more corporate, but the other bordered on juvenile. We surveyed our peers to see what free associations people made with the logos, and a our winner emerged.
