Logo Makeover 101
We recently completed an identity update for New Morning Foundation, an organization that seeks to improve young people’s access to reproductive health education, counseling, and clinical services throughout South Carolina. We were asked to give the existing logo a “facelift” and to redesign existing brand identity collateral.
Why do we “rebrand” anyway? That word and the word “branding” are thrown around quite a bit, but it’s important to remember that the logo is not the “brand.” The brand is all about the customer touchpoints and the experience one has when interacting with the organization — when you boil it all down, the brand is someone’s gut instinct about a company or organization. I remember Marty Neumier stating years ago in a workshop that “the brand” is what OTHERS say it is, not what the company says it is. That statement has stuck with me for years.
And the logo is a small, but very important part of the brand. It must strike the right balance of the rational and the emotional. It must convey the spirit of the organization in a split-second. The cross-sensory experience is the brand, but the logo has to uphold and to support that.
Changes or redesigns could mark an internal cultural shift, a change in business objectives, or change in ownership. Often times, as in the case of New Morning Foundation, it’s a matter of staying relevant and is born from the desire to have visual consistency across mediums. Lay a solid foundation with a strong, meaningful logo, and that will help branding efforts at any level.
Old logo
New logo
New identity package
