Branding
Brand Strategy
Social Media
Web Design
Illustration
Elements
Year
2022
Instructor
Abby Guido
Friends of Hackett is a non-for-profit, community group that supports Horatio B. Hackett Elementary School. I had the opportunity to be apart of their rebranding, alongside my group members who I collaborated with. We developed a logo, brand guide, website, and designed social media templates to create a professional, yet playful identity.
Friends of Hackett
GETTING STARTED
My group and I were given the opportunity to construct a complete rebrand for Friends of Hackett, as well as design the branding for their annual block party fundraising event. Our main goals were to create a branding strategy that aligned with their mission and provide them with structured design guidelines for their overall brand and their event. We wanted to establish vital, designed, tools to sustain their business and achieve a visually pleasing, youthful aesthetic that conveys their professionalism.
I oversaw all of the design for the event, set up the structure of brainstorming sessions, decided how many concepts each designer will present, and put together the design presentations for review. I was responsible for making sure every concept was fully explored, assisting with the decision making process for individual team members.
I was also in charge of design deliverables, and working closely with the Project Manager to ensure the work is being divided up appropriately. I worked with the Client Manager and Lead Strategist on client meeting preparation, and the creative brief for the branding.
STRATEGY & LOGO DRAFTS
After our first client meeting the Friends of Hackett board, we established the goals and expectations for our project as well as what deliverables they wanted by the end of our time working together. Their main goals as an organization were to overall improve the outcome and support of Hackett for the students, staff, leadership, and community.
They also expressed wanting to have the ability to expand the demographics of people who support and donate to FOH. By the end of the meeting we were able to establish a list of deliverables, including a modernized panda logo, low maintenance website, social media templates, wearables, event poster and signage for the block party, and an updated newsletter template.
First/Second Round
Third Round
Final Round
FINAL LOGO & BRAND IDENTITY
SOCIAL MEDIA
The social media design was one of the main aspects of the branding that I worked on for this project. I originally created the frame of boxes, that would eventually expand across the entire identity, for the social media templates. I wanted to create a playful, colorful style that still reflected the professionalism of the brand.
It was also important that I keep the templates as simple as possible while still conveying all of the necessary information. All of the elements were designed to be used in a drag and drop method, making the branding easy to combine and assemble for the board members on a day-to-day basis.
ICON LIBRARY
A major component of the social media design was the use of icons. I created a clean, line drawing style that I transferred across the entire icon library. We created eleven different themes for the icons; flowers, garden, school, animals, science and music, food, weather, sports, numbers, environment, events, and holidays. Overall, I created over one hundred different icons that could be applied across the entire Friends of Hackett identity. This became a useful design element that could effortlessly be applied through the use of Canva.
WEB DESIGN
GARDEN EVENT
We created a site map that ended up being simpler than the previous Friends of Hackett site with 6 tabs and no sub menus. This allows the viewer to be able to see all of the tabs in front of them without having to hover over any menu items.The tabs we landed on are a Home page, About Us page, Get Involved page, Shop page, and Support Us page.
The content on each page was important to organize properly for easy understanding by the viewer. On the home page, the content is limited to a large photo of the logo as well as the mission statement and instagram feed at the bottom. This level of simplicity on the homepage was important to the organization to not distract from the main goals and current events.
Another important piece of the brand was to design a seasonal newsletter that would be a direct communication between Friends of Hackett and their volunteers or community members. We utilized the icons created previously and turned them into a colorful pattern that would be used as headers for each newsletter, depending on the season. This adds a playful and illustrative design element to catch their member's eye as they scroll through their emails.
FOH NEWSLETTER
As a part of our rebranding of Friends of Hackett we organized an event at the Hackett Elementary School playground. This event's purpose was to show the community Friends of Hackett's new and improved logo, as well as provide fun and engaging activities for the children. While this event was going on volunteers and parents were also invited to lend a hand in the garden.
The garden party event was a great experience for our group and a joy to give back to the community. We produced pins with our new logo on it to give out to everyone, in addition to planned activities that included chalk drawing, panda sketching, panda mask-making, and face painting which I was in charge of. Everyone had an amazing time enjoying the crafts and helping out in the garden, including state representative, Mary Isaccson.
BLOCK PARTY BRANDING
