Our Image & Voice, Part 2 of 2: Co-creation & Design Processes
That firefighting plane we've been building and flying
We thank all our friends and supporters for the many compliments and positive messages we've received through the first few months of unveiling our newly redesigned website, organizational identity, and new logo. The same is true of our recent New Year's mailing, which previewed our new season's topic, Kai Poma, through a selection of postcards. Our monthly donors additionally received a numbered lino print by fellow co-director Anchal Bibra, also inspired by the land and coastline we are helping to be returned.
As much as we're thankful for all the messages of appreciation for the thought and love that have gone into these materials, it must be said that none of this was by accident. Instead, it results from following through with how our organizational identity has been designed.
After all, everything around you–from the luminous screen you are reading this on to your clothes, the mug you may be drinking from, the piece of furniture holding your body, or the sidewalk, vehicle, or ceiling of the space you're at right now–all those things have been designed before coming into existence. And, while good design can easily be overlooked, bad design can make you miserable or even kill you, so there are many reasons to care about it!
At Minnow, we have dedicated time and internal resources to being intentional about our organizational identity. That is what the first part of this article looked at, how my fellow co-director Anchal Bibra and I joined Minnow's co-founding team members as their new storytellers and how we began creating a new organizational identity while figuring out the operational details of our organization and providing services to our clients at the same time–hence this section's subtitle.
In this second part, we'll look at the processes that created the image and voice guidelines that inform everything you have seen from Minnow.
From brand assessment to mood board
In the first part of this article, we mentioned some references from organizations and business brands shared among Minnow's co-directors at the beginning of this process. Then, on par with our mood board, those references were gathered, along with different nonprofits, partner organizations, and other examples we looked up, into a structured comparison. This exercise became our brand ecosystem assessment.
The assessment looked at a total of 40 references and compared all of them through four main categories: the entities' names and official logos, specific characteristics of their logos, their relationship with the entity's website and brand identity, and descriptive summaries of the look and feel for each reference's website.
There were several takeaways from this comparative exercise. The most memorable brand experiences held solid visual connections between logos and website color schemes, typographic approaches, and sometimes content structuring. Yet the majority of websites tended towards blocky or mosaic content structures. While land or farm-related organizations tended to rely almost exclusively on nature or farming imagery, commercial brands centered their products, often framed as seasonal or limited.
Then there was the topic of size and longevity among the brands assessed. We identified three standard website extents; introductory and small, well-established and large, and curated and limited. This trait helped us consider our expectations on what the extent of our website should be.
Being a four-person, fiscally sponsored project, we couldn't present ourselves like a fully-staffed or long-standing brand even if we wanted to. So instead, we became fixed on being more of a slow, artisanal, or boutique-sized brand, something truer to where our organization is. But how do we want to look and be perceived then? Here is where the concepts and intents shared in our mood board came in.
Our Image and voice concept
We drafted a synthesis of what we aspired our image and voice concept to be by combining takeaways from our brand ecosystem assessment with the main subjects and intentions contributed by all co-directors to our mood board.
Among these, there was the need to center the artistry, colors, and imagery of the peoples and lands we work for. This artisanal aspect was mainly visual but connected to other references in the mood board that focused on the presence of food and the senses in culture and film. Another important topic was serialized approaches to subjects through references to series, podcasts, and TV shows.
That contribution included word-based activist art and cultural jamming, which connected with other mood board references to political art, counter-appropriation, and activist art from different places and struggles. Yet another mood board contribution linked some of the latter topics with typography, protest art, illustration, and with the value of clear intentions in graphic design and visual storytelling.
Our image and voice concept was derived from connecting our intentions while reflecting on how other organizations present themselves and on our capacities. We call it our Five-Point System. As its name says, it is based on five conceptual hinges: seasonality, sensoriality, deep dives, typography, and space.
Seasonality is rooted in the annual cycles of the Earth, which grounds our work to the land and its rhythms. Sensoriality gathers the tactile and sensorial, including colors, smells, and textures, but as a function of the seasons and the places and people we serve. Deep dives refer to how we choose and focus on topics for our conversations and storytelling during a season. Typography is self-explanatory but entails being intentional about our visual approach to the written word since this conveys meaning all by itself, thus hopefully helping us share our place in the world. Lastly, space is simply the backdrop against which all other four points unfold. It implies being mindful of the spaciousness in everything from the computer screen to the margins of a letter, the layout of a web page, or the many characteristics of a physical place, farmland, or landscape.
In a way, the last part of our five-point identity system hints at how these otherwise loose concepts are brought back to our workplace, whether behind the screen or out in the field. So, to recap, seasonality ties us to change and to reflect on the topics we're working on for a season. Next, sensoriality takes our attention to the visuals and textures found in our work to communicate those to others. Finally, deep dives are how we frame and tell the stories related to those seasonal topics, using typographical intent while being mindful of space in the broadest sense of the word.
Minnow's image and voice identity is a system or scheme that tells us how we structure and approach work in time while deriving our look and feel from that same work, along with its places, people, and sensory characteristics. Yet, some essential elements had to be defined before these ongoing work cycles could begin.
The search for typefaces
Designing an original typeface from scratch was too much of an expensive, resource-consuming endeavor for a four-person team without that specific technical know-how. And, since we weren't in a position to do so, selecting Minnow's official typefaces was a straightforward process guided by several requirements.
First, there was the need for some continuity with how Minnow presented itself until then, notably with an all-caps, text-based logo using a sans-serif font in dark green. Then there was the need for our fonts to be compatible across our work platforms; Google Workplace, our devices' operating systems, and Squarespace, our web host. Finally, we wanted our fonts to be versatile enough to convey the range of moods conceived under our image and voice identity concept. As typeface uses go, this could imply anything from the bold directness of activist text-based slogans to the subtle, more didactic qualities of captions and small print applications.
We first looked at existing fonts shared across our devices' operating systems, but those weren't too appealing. Then, we briefly considered investing in licensing an original typeface from a dedicated foundry, which we quickly discarded since the cost of paying for and maintaining the usage of licensed fonts among a team of primarily non-designers would prove difficult and over the top. After shopping around a bit more, we finally decided that choosing typefaces from Google Fonts would meet all our requirements most cost-effectively.
At that point, our search was narrowed to limited possibilities under two main options. One was sticking to a Sans-serif font, like the one we had already been using in our initial logo and communications. The other was shifting entirely to a serif font. Continuity with what was before suggested we stick to the former. Broadening the range of moods for our identity allowed us to explore the latter.
In the end, we searched for both kinds of typefaces among what was available in Google Fonts. We noted during this search the high number of type designers from Spanish-speaking countries, of which many were women. It was very refreshing to notice this for what otherwise has been a traditionally male-dominated, highly niche field. Soon enough, we shortlisted several pairs of serif and sans-serif typefaces. The final selections were primarily based on readability and the number of fonts included with each typeface.
To maintain some recognition of Minnow's initial image, we decided to use a sans serif for our primary selection, which we would use in our name, slogans, headers, and the like. To allow a more extensive range of moods and graphic applications, we decided also to select a secondary typeface with serifs, which we would use for text publications, letters, and anything that had to read more formally.
Minnow's color palette
Choosing the specifics of Minnow's color palette was less straightforward but much simpler than the other two processes described here. Just as we aimed to maintain some continuity or recognition with how Minnow had previously presented itself through our search for typefaces, here, too, we wanted to keep green as part of our palette, regardless of any other colors that we ended up choosing.
We started by trying two very different roads. Still, both sought the same objective: to have a fixed color palette for Minnow's website and communications materials that could coexist with a temporary color palette that would vary each season. One route we took was parametric. It attempted to distill colors from our mood board using statistical filters and online tools to find average hues. Another way was by subjective associations of colors and their meanings.
While applying a parametric method several times to the mood board produced the kind of neutral, toned-down colors you'd expect from averaging or mixing lots of colors, the subjective approach proved a more direct, albeit the many caveats that symbolic color associations may have, like cultural context.
Time and resource constraints and several selection and representational issues presented by the parametric approach soon tipped the scale for a subjective association of colors grounded on our local context, which was also part of our image and voice intentions. We kept a green that echoed Minnow's initial image, paired it with a purplish blue that spoke to us of the waters crucial to our client's work, and added a warm pair of yellow and orange which reminded us of California poppies and marigolds.
With that palette defined for Minnow's fixed colors, we allowed enough space for seasonal colors to stand out depending on what we're working on in any given season. So now we had one last component to decide for our image and voice.
Our new logo
My fellow co-director Anchal Bibra and I set out to sketch new logos probing different directions. Still, these all tried to accomplish three objectives: communicating our name, conveying our brand identity, and maintaining some continuity with what our cofounders had already been using. Another important opportunity seized was referencing California's local work context.
From there, most of our sketches could be grouped into three main directions: all-caps type-only logos, name plus graphic element logos, and the highly speculative ever-changing logo.
The first, all-caps type-only, turned out to be more like variations of the initial logo already being used by Minnow. The highly experimental ever-changing logo direction appeared innovative but implied an intense, ongoing process beyond our team's capacity to maintain. And so, the second logo direction of a name plus a graphic element quickly proved more useful, eventually giving us our top option to polish.
As you can see from some of the process sketches shared here, some interesting routes were explored. Several were based on simplified icons of a fish that proved too close to religious symbolism for us. Other variants of this direction appeared too formal for the small-team organizational identity we wanted to convey. Yet another option also caught our attention for a while, a bubbly hand-drawn logo that traced an oval that reminded us of a fish pond. We found its playfulness and informality appealing.
Several graphic themes were commonly explored through all these directions. Some made their way to the final logo, including influences like Oakland's contemporary graffiti and its vintage signs–which have also inspired other logos–along with Indigenous iconography and M.C. Escher-like tessellations. Then there was the famous Oakland city logo, drawn in the early 1970s by Wally Carroll, who was the city's public information officer at the time. The tree's offset lines reminded me of Lance Wyman's widely influential Mexico 1968 Olympics identity design and Walter Landor's famous 1975 Muni worm logo. These similarities also allowed me to relate our work to two hometowns of mine, which are also linked by shared cultures and histories.
The variation that led to our final logo was an attempt to keep the fish and the offset lines, so we went around the religious associations of previous variants. We approximated this by reverting to a discarded sketch of clasping hands and delineating the fish from them. So, in the end, the two minnows in our logo echo the same hands we see working the soil and protecting its waters day in and day out. These elements, in turn, became referenced by the offset lines, which can be seen as crop rows, land, or water ripples–all fundamental to the work of our farmers.
The last reference embedded in Minnow's new logo is that of East and Southeast Asian name seals, like the Japanese hanko or inkan, or the Chinese zhuwen. This further grounds our logo in those cultures' contributions to California and is a function of its final shape, of how we call its parts–the name and the seal–and of how we use both parts in official communications by often separating them, to begin with our name and end with our seal, or by "stamping" an item with both together as our complete logo.
Almost done, but not quite
While this article summarizes the main ideas and processes that went into designing our image and voice guidelines, this has also been a learning process, with experimentation and adjustments still being made.
One example of this is how we define a season and its duration. While the idea behind seasonality is to ground our work in the natural seasons, we noticed early along the process that, given our commitments and capacity, initial seasons would have to be biannual in duration.
Photography and video, for instance, are two intimately related areas that are easier to prescribe in intention than to follow up with in actual practice. The same is true or even worse for verbal tone and the written word. We expected most stylistic language-related questions would come up as we went, which has undoubtedly been the case.
And so, the process continues. Many work documents and presentations were referenced in the writing of this blog post. Those same references are informing our image and voice guidelines document, which we'll be able to share with consultants and collaborators to keep presenting how we've done it so far.
Until then, thanks again to our friends and supporters for making this work possible and for the comments of enthusiasm and encouragement you've shared so far with us.
We hope to keep it up!
Javier Roman-Nieves