It was nearly a year ago and we were fresh off of finishing the Center for Social Inclusion re-brand and website. I met Rye Young at a party and we started—I started—talking about branding. We had a good conversation and apparently he later went back and told others at the Third Wave Foundation (where he was then an intern) about the substance of our conversation. We got a call from another intern there a few weeks later to talk more about branding. I did. We got a call from the Director of External Relations to talk more about it. I did. We set up a meeting and I walked them through the process we had just finished with CSI. I did not leave out the false starts, and interim steps that led to the final results. This conversation got me a meeting with the Executive Director for whom I did the same thing. Other agencies were brought in to pitch and apparently submitted proposals. We won, I have to assume, because the competition proposed building a new website and we proposed, as we always do, to build a brand with the website as a keynote implementation of that brand.

They saw it, they understood it and they bought it. Thus begins our journey to a new brand with the Third Wave Foundation.

The first step in the process was to conduct a survey of the brand’s stake holders to determine the long term viability of the existing organizational name, which had been opened as a question. No clear imperative emerged from this process and this was sufficient indication that the name need not be changed.

With the name question behind us, we started in earnest with our strategic brand brief. This was accomplished over the course of three meetings with a large swath of the organization’s brand stake holders.

Because of the, not so uncommon, diffuse decision making structure of the organization, we decided to break the process up into stages with moving to the next stage contingent on an agreement about the matters addressed in the stage prior. Some clients are perfectly ready to receive a complete “package” viewable in one creative execution. This was not going to be that kind of organization and we knew it. First we set on the color palette. We did a series of pallets until we go to something that everyone was happy with.

With this approved, we moved on to the website look and feel. Our first presented version was as follows:

This first pass still looks strong, and many of the underlying elements have remained intact throughout the process. The main navigation and use of and style of  the brand statement to the right of the video, the video itself, and the content buckets on the page below the fold. What the client needed that this version did not give them was more of a felling of youth. It came down too far on the slick and professional side for them.

Simultaneous to this visual development of the brand, the brand statement was, it turned out, a process that developed primarily as an internal process, with us pushing from the outside. At the beginning of the conversation about this statement of purpose that we wanted for the home page, we nicknamed it “the manifesto.” This name has stuck. Working out this language took as much time as almost all the rest of the process.

As the visual manifestations of the brand evolved, the tone and manner moved more in the direction of street art and away from the slightly edgy, but professional persona that we had originally proposed. See below some of the iterations along the way:

At this point we had arrived at the essential components of the new brand. The golden yellow background and the tinted field for the type, the blue and green/gold highlight colors and the use of manipulated people photography and distressed manifesto copy on the home page. What remained unresolved at this point were the exact photo treatment style and the logo which was still just a place holder.

The logo, it turned out, was going to be a real challenge filled with stops and starts and much internal soul searching among those within the organization. The challenge was to find a symbol that felt right to them to represent who they were. To show a quick gloss on the path we traveled see some of the “almosts” below:

At which point a vision actually came to me in a dream of the three interlocking rings as the simplest way to represent the essential meaning we were assigned to convey: “Youth, Intersection, (em)power.” With that, we had finally arrived at the shores of the promised logo. Now it was a matter of working out the details.

And so the final logo treatment is this:

And so, starting from the brand where it was when we found it, we took it from here (based on a home page screen shot pulled in November of 2009)…

…to here. This is the final and approved brand execution on the web:

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