Our Image & Voice, Part 1 of 2: Prep Work & Mood Board
Building the plane while you fly it and then some
You've surely heard or said the phrase "building the plane while you're flying it." A colleague used it after asking how we were doing when my fellow co-director Anchal Bibra and I were a few months into our jobs at Minnow. It seemed helpful at the time to describe how our organization was coming about, except that the plane we were building was, as it turns out, also a firefighting tanker.
It wasn't just that Minnow already existed while we were still sorting out the details of its external and internal components–like our governance responsibilities, job descriptions, and work plans, to name a few. We were also providing services and support to our clients while we were at it! So, what has gone into creating our organizational identity, given the circumstances?
In this two-part blog article, we'll go into the details of how Minnow's image and voice have been coming about. From our color palette to our photography, our fonts and how we use them, to our very own first logo–we'll share some of the processes, ideas, and considerations that went into figuring out how we wanted to present ourselves to partners, friends, supporters, clients, and the world.
We began last October, but it started before
As Minnow's new storytelling Co-Directors, Anchal Bibra and I joined the organization in the fall of 2021. Shortly after, we met with our co-founders in San Diego for our first quarterly work retreat. We spent a week learning more about each other, discussing how we came about as persons and an organization, and drawing a path forward together, with small and big-picture goals drafted along the way.
We also visited and met two of the worker co-owners from our first farmer client, Pixca Farm, and had lunch with members of one of our closest partner organizations, the San Diego Food Systems Alliance. So, what came next?
We were happily swimming among our fellow Minnows after those kick-off sessions, eager and excited to have others join us in our cause of securing land tenure for farmers of color and advancing indigenous sovereignty in California. Yet, how would we invite others to swim with us when we didn't have any waters of our own?
Minnow's founding co-directors had been going at it since October 2019, when they signed our fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. We did have a word-based logo and a landing webpage that was more of a placeholder than anything else. However, we were, in short, somewhere between larvae and juvenile fish, swimming in a pond but still needing to be ready to take on river waters!
First things first
After adopting some basic workflows for media file management, we looked at the storytelling goals drafted during that first retreat. We broke those down by projects and their subtasks. Next, we considered them in relation to goals from our different program areas, including land tenure, resource mobilization, and internal governance, also focusing on our client and grassroots fundraising needs. One pressing takeaway became apparent: we needed our basic communications platform to be in place before swimming into larger waters!
Some of these immediately needed front home items were: a website we could send people to check out our work and what we stood for, with multiple components, most notably an updated actions page; a newsletter where we could periodically give an account of how far we've come and the work we're doing; and last but not least, a plan for our social media outreach efforts.
Of course, the website would be informed by our updated strategic statements–vision and mission, principles, and work culture–which we discussed during that first retreat but hadn't polished. That was one more item in that long list, and a very important one because it would also be the foundation for a purposeful approach to our audiences which, in turn, was an integral part of our strategic and grassroots fundraising plans! While these two individual efforts are only now being completed, none could have happened before envisioning an image and voice for Minnow.
A note on branding and brand guidelines
We wanted to sidestep both the egregious history of "branding," which notoriously includes the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, and its present consumer-culture connotations, so we chose to refer to what would otherwise be "brand guidelines" as "image and voice guidelines."
People usually use "brand identity" to refer to the topic at hand, though. But besides carrying the added complexities of an "identity," this usually includes an organization's strategic statements. In contrast, guidelines on their own don't necessarily do so and may cover specific usage rules (e.g., use our logo this way and not that way, our official fonts are this and that–without going into mission or vision details and the like).
While many brands resort to typography and images inspired by the International Style to accommodate ever-fluid audience definitions, the definition of a core experience for a brand is still needed. The what and how that would look like for Minnow, became a consensual process whose outcome is being collected in our guidelines.
Minnow's image and voice guidelines are intended to serve both internal and external purposes for us. They are to be constantly referenced to maintain visual and tone coherence among our co-directors' communications while also being shared with consultants and collaborators to be followed with that same purpose in mind.
Now, brand guidelines run a wide budgetary and time resource gamut, from a-few-thousand-dollars-one-person concepts for small businesses done in a few weeks, to six-figure efforts done by whole marketing and design teams through many months of work, and typically involving the participation of an organization's board members, executives, and often wider staff.
As Minnow's storytellers, we came in with experience on both ends of that spectrum and from both creative and client perspectives. In looking at our near and long-term goals, we came to recognize the need to co-create our own image and voice guidelines while accommodating other work to proceed simultaneously. In other words, we would finish building the plane while flying it and extinguishing fires.
And so, we recommended our whole team join us on an ongoing effort to create image and voice guidelines for internal use first to use these in producing a robust organizational home for Minnow and only then figure out the details of more thorough guidelines for external use. So this is where we're at today.
The effort that followed
One usually joins a workplace where everything is already set up. You are given brand guidelines to follow, shown where files, logos, and presentation templates are stored, get the spiel from human resources, and eventually find your way into an existing work culture. At Minnow, however, in adhering to our democratic workplace principles, our co-founders welcomed us into actually polishing out all those components collectively as co-directors. Needless to say, it's been a unique opportunity and an enriching journey so far.
Instead of receiving something pre-made for us, it would be ourselves as part of a team, carefully choosing and crafting how we would present ourselves to the world. As storytellers, we had been entrusted by our co-founders with the huge responsibility of leading this process. No pressure!
This is where our mood board came in. Mood boards used to be literally bulletin boards or office walls where creative staff would attach clippings of text and images–but mostly the latter–that approximated the intended feeling or experience that a project had to convey, thus the "mood" part of it. Think of the feeling that remains in your mind of a clothing brand after visiting their store or the general impression you take away from a restaurant for which you would return, or the vibe you expect to get from a movie after watching a trailer. A mood board is a collage of bits and pieces that, when taken as a whole, makes up the intended look and feel of something.
Another way to look at it is by thinking about what people want to convey for attendants to events when they send out dress codes in their invitations–and then staring at your closet and trying to match that code after searching for images of what it means. Except that with our mood board, we created the dress code of how we wanted Minnow to look, not the other way around. Wasn't that exciting? Hell yes, it was!
That is how the first step of our image and voice process began, with the co-creation of an official mood board.
Up until then
Throughout the weeks leading up to that first in-person retreat, we shared and talked about many references and contained examples of many things we liked, most of them under different conversational contexts, but all under the aspiration of what Minnow's image could look like. From Le Labo Fragances to Supreme or Patagonia on the lifestyle brand side of things, to the Castanea Fellowship, A Growing Culture, or Slow Factory on the more organizational and activist side. There were many others, but that's to name a few.
Voice-wise, we shared the short documentary video from the Somali Bantu Community Association and the Agrarian Trust, listened to podcast episodes from The Red Nation, marveled at Fibershed's extensive storytelling efforts, and watched the San Diego Food Systems Alliance's Food Vision 2030 trailer. This dive into existing brands and organizations would eventually grow into a 40-item long brand ecosystem assessment in the latter part of the process. But then, it was time to bring some of those initial references to the table, or rather, to the mood board!
Minnow's storytellers would be putting together the actual mood board but using the images and references submitted by all co-directors. We could either take a basic approach to this by sharing just a few sources and notes or be very detailed in explaining why and how each reference was important for a particular contribution to Minnow. The crucial thing was for all co-directors to chime in and be represented in the process.
Our mood board prompt
For this, we asked ourselves to provide references around two main prompts, one for our image and one for our voice. The first was to list at least three organizations, brands, or entities that each co-director liked and to briefly explain why or how that would be relevant for Minnow. The second was to list at least three podcasts, TV series, newscasts, or any other example that could convey each co-director’s favorite way of listening and talking about the world and its problems and explain why.
These references could be our media appearances as co-directors, or even books, comics, paintings, documentaries, or single-version works, not necessarily a media outlet or recurring series or production. We also encouraged ourselves to include screenshots of our references and to save photos or copy-paste texts from each into our contributions. The latter would help us storytellers look for specific content for our mood board.
We also asked everyone to include opposing selections, things unliked, and references of things we’re set on not emulating or even remotely looking or sounding like. Knowing this would ensure that nothing put up on the final mood board would be unlikable or off-putting to any of us.
While our mood board was created by the end of our first quarter working together, some of the subsequent phases of this process are still ongoing. This process has included drafting an image and voice concept, followed by other basics, like collectively designing a logo, choosing our official typefaces or fonts, an official color palette, and many other details that we’re still sorting out to this very day.
In the second part of this blog article, we’ll share more of these and how the mood board provided the inspiration, references, and intentions behind Minnow’s image and voice.
Until then,
Javier Roman-Nieves