Orr Fellowship Brand Refresh
OVERVIEW
Orr Fellowship's core brand until 2022 included three core colors: navy, blue, and orange. As a member of the Design and Social Media teams, I quickly realized that using solely these three colors on graphics was very limiting, let alone not very accessible to read.
In November 2021, the Orr Design Team of three began collaborating on ways to refresh the Orr brand, without changing the core foundations.
ROLE
Designer // Graphic Design, Product Management, Time Management // Figma, Procreate, Adobe Suite
DATE
November 2021 - May 2022 (36 total hours, team of three)
A New Passion
It was so rewarding to take a brand I knew inside and out and make it into something even better. Through this project, I realized my interest and passion for brand design. I was able to:
🎤 Advocate for the brand refresh and propose it to the Executive Director. After the team had a solid plan of the direction we wanted to take, we prepared a proposal presentation for the Executive Director of Orr. we stressed that this would be a refresh, and not mess with the core pillars of the brand (logo, four c's messaging).
🎨 Collaborate with the team. I worked as part of a team of three to develop an expanded color palette, add a new typeface, and create new illustrations for the brand.
💻 Prepare collateral with the refreshed theme. There was a lot of collateral to update/create after the refresh was completed: slide decks, iconography, one-sheeters, playbooks, internal website, email signatures, brand book, and more.
Let's Get Refreshed
The main reason for the brand refresh was to communicate consistency and professionalism to prospective candidates and Partner Companies. Our brand needed to be able to attract top candidates to our program and entice them to stay.
As part of the requirements put in place by Orr's Executive Director, we couldn't touch the core foundations of the brand which included the logo and the core color palette (navy, blue, and orange - we could alter the hex codes, but keep them in the same color family). For this refresh, we focused on expanding the color palette, adding an additional typeface, and revising the iconography.
Color Palette
Three colors were very limiting to design with - orange could only be used as an accent, and didn't look great on top of either blue color. Because of this, a lot of designs ended up having a navy background, which resulted in a one-tone Instagram feed (left). The expanded color palette allowed for many more possibilities for designs (right).
Typefaces
Our signature typeface, Cabin was versatile enough for our normal purposes, but if we had a design that needed to convey warmth or elegance, Cabin wouldn't cut it. Brittany was the perfect font to complete our typography package: it displays energy, warmth, and elegance.
Iconography
The original icons were tough to use on a variety of backgrounds, given the translucent backgrounds. Because of this, we knew the refreshed icons would need to have solid color.
For the refresh, Design Coordinator Sarah Rozzi championed the recreation of the icons.
It's Collateral Time
After our proposed revisions were approved, we got to work on the collateral with the new design theme. One of the largest pieces of collateral I made was a branded slide deck for everyone in the Fellowship to use. To check out some of the other graphics I made using the new brand theme, check out this page!