In this article, you will learn how to design a visual identity for your activist movement. By creating a design handbook for your communication team, your movement will look more professional and consistent on social media, your website and all other visual representations.

Visual Identity #

Visual identity is an important part of any movement's marketing strategy. To really have an effect it needs to be recognisable, simple and memorable. Its elements can include:

• 🌻Logo

• 🎨Color Palette

• ☮️Visual Elements

Logo #

The logo of a campaign, organization, or movement plays a central role, as it will be used repeatedly across different contexts and materials. It should therefore meet several key criteria:

• Iconic: It needs to be easily recognizable and memorable. A strong, distinctive design helps people instantly associate the logo with your cause.

• Include the name: The logo should feature the name of the movement (or at least there should be a version that does). Otherwise, people may not know how to find or learn more about your group.

• Simple: The more complex a logo is, the more difficult and costly it becomes to reproduce, especially on banners or flags.

• Visually striking: A logo can already communicate your issue and evoke meaning through specific visual elements, symbols, or colors. It sets the tone and creates an immediate impression.

  • The Noun project provides a variety of simple icons for nearly every term or idea, which can be helpful while drafting a new logo.

• Adaptable: A good logo works in different formats and contexts. For example, a colorful version might look great online but be ineffective in black-and-white print.

Example: Climate justice group Extinction Rebellion uses a simple design made by artist "ESP" in 2011 featuring a hourglass inside a circle, signifying that time for earth is running out. While this simple design was drawn widely on flags and banners, it was more often used in a more complex logo which includes the organization's name to ensure recognizability.

Colours #

Selecting colors as the basis for palettes depends on a variety on a variety of factors

• The colours could associate meanings. For example:

  • Use of town, regional, or county colours may work well for local or regional campaigns

  • Colours may also associated with a certain movement (e.g. 🟢 green for environmental issues, 🟣pink/purple for feminist movements, ⚪white for peace etc)

    • Schemecolor has a variety of palettes associated with themes, such as danger, feminism, environment etc.

  • Associated meanings may hurt your cause: Dark colours may not work in a campaign for children’s park, but light pastels may work better

• The colours in a palette should fit to each other, as they can easily create unfortunate difficulties, especially for those with visual disabilities. To counteract there are several methods.

  • Colours can be selected by tone, for example by settling on pastel colors.

  • Colours should have enough contrast, especially when regarding people with colour blindnesses.

  • Cololur palettes can be reduced to two or three colours to keep them iconic and simple.

  • Colours can be sorted into a hierarchy, like main colour (for the typical background of a post), secondary colour (often for secondary headlines), accent colours (for bolded words, underlines, text boxes, etc) and contrast colours like white, black (for text or other use-cases in which contrast is of importance).

• Color palette selection tools can help with generation fitting ones.

  • Coolors.co allows random generation of palettes, as well as generating them based on existing photos

Example: The Just Stop Oil campaign uses a simple orange and black colour palette, making the distributed protests easy to recognize while immediately evoking the thought of danger.

Example: The Activist Handbook uses a colour palette with different shades of beige as background, dark grey for text and then mostly a bright red and blue as accent colours. See if you can spot it!

Visual Elements #

"A picture is worth a thousand words"
- common saying

By translating the central parts of your organization's or campaign's story into visual elements, audiences can be reached much more easily. Think about translating your story's enemy, vision, objective, danger, hero etc into:

• Costumes

• Puppets

• Theatre performance

• Visually striking action material

• Banners

• Symbols

Example: Campaigns towards redistribution often use Robin Hood as a powerful visual metaphor.

Related articles #

• Tools for graphic design

• Communication chapter

External resources #

Most resources on this topic are very much commerically focussed. However, we can use their tools to fight against capitalism:

• Design for change by Sogi Campaigns

• Corporate identity by Wikipedia

• How to build a strong corporate identity by 99designs

• The Ultimate Guide to Create a Brand Identity by Nate Butler

• Projecting Power: Visual Strategy for Movements by Look Loud

• Tips for Designing Infographics by Sophie Hartley