Collaborative to End Human Trafficking is a Cleveland-based nonprofit organization that aims to eradicate human trafficking in Northeast Ohio. The client was looking to solidify their brand image and make managing their Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube profiles easier.
To achieve these goals, our team worked to create a brand style guide and social media content calendar with graphic templates and copy examples. We met with the President/CEO and the Director of Development within the organization to clarify and present our work.
As an Account Specialist for the project and the team’s graphic designer, I used the organization’s existing logo and brand tone to develop visual brand guidelines. Additionally, I created graphic assets to be used alongside the logo in branded materials.
To connect the new guidelines to the organization’s social media platforms, I designed headers for their profiles and graphic templates that followed an ideal week social media plan developed by others on the team.
To get a feel for their current brand, I extracted all the colors from their logo using Coolors.co. After all colors were converted into hex codes, I made three consolidated color palettes to be used primarily digitally. I found fonts on both Canva and Adobe products that complimented the typography in their logo.
The freeform people shapes from their logo and new, organic shapes were made into separate assets in Adobe Illustrator.
I put together a brand style guide sheet including the logo versions, primary and secondary colors, fonts, and additional brand assets in Illustrator.
Once the style guidelines were approved by the client, the guide was used to create other graphics for digital use. This included updated social media headers for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as ideal week graphic templates, a YouTube watermark, and YouTube video thumbnail templates. All templates were created in Canva to ensure easy duplication by the client as needed.
Coolors.co
Adobe Illustrator
Canva
Final Brand Style Sheet
Updated Facebook Banner
Updated LinkedIn Banner
Updated Twitter Banner
Updated YouTube Banner
Upon the completion of this project, the client had tools to create their own consistent social media content and had guidance on how to present the brand moving forward. After implementing the new style on their social media pages, the client's Facebook and Instagram reach increased by 174.8% and 1.4K%, respectively, in three months.
Collaborative to End Human Trafficking has continued to use this style as well as some of the social media graphics created two years after the project's end. They also changed the typography in their logo to better match the style guide.
This experience showed me how important it is that the visual brand elements for an organization reflect the tone of their messaging, and vice versa.
Original Logo
Updated Logo Created Externally Post-Project
