Brand Book (The Exodus Road)
When I started working at The Exodus Road (TER), everything pertaining to the brand could be found in a single-page document. The “brand”, at that point, consisted of two hex codes, a couple of outdated fonts, the logo, and tagline. TER was a young NGO that had just started gaining traction in the counter-human trafficking space. To boost this momentum, I took on the development of the brand in an updated aesthetic, complete with a set of comprehensive guidelines. Over several months, I lead this project from concept to completion, collaborating with my in-house team and cross-functional departments to create the organization’s first Brand Book.
INTRODUCTION
As an NGO in the humanitarian sector, defining our core essence, mission, and operational approach was crucial to our marketing efforts. Donors needed to know not just what we were doing, but how we were doing it. With unethical practices being rampant within the counter-human trafficking space, our posture towards preserving survivor dignity and case sensitivity was unique, noteworthy, and necessary information to share with donors.
LOGO
Once we moved into the visual direction of our brand, logo treatment was front and center. With this being the visual cornerstone of our organization—passing through many hands and living on various surfaces—guidance pertaining to sizing, spacing, and positioning with other creative elements (i.e. backgrounds, images) was key to ensuring proper usage.
COLOR
While TER’s color palette was minimal at the time this initiative took place, application guidelines were needed to accomplish our desired aesthetic. Our two primary colors were being applied with a 50/50 approach, leading to an overwhelm of color and elementary look/feel that we had outgrown. In order to ensure cleaner, more effective design, it was advised the our “Rescue Blue” be our primary color, and that “Survivor Yellow” would be a supporting tone, used sparingly to create clean, delicate contrast.
TYPOGRAPHY
A new font family was implemented as part of this brand refresh. I chose Avenir Next to be the primary typeface, not only because it is a clean, straightforward sans serif, but because it is a versatile font family with a wide range of weights. This allowed us to create hierarchy throughout copy on our main marketing touchpoints. Two secondary typefaces were chosen as well, to be used for specific content such as rescue announcements and donor events.
PHOTOGRAPHY
TER prides itself in ethical storytelling and maintaining integrity when gathering and sharing photos. Because of the sensitive nature of human trafficking cases—from both a tactical and ethical standpoint—representative photography was used to depict the people, culture, and essence of the stories being told. This was a crucial piece of the brand policy, as well as how our photos were obtained. Because most of our photography was captured in the field, a code of ethics was outlined that prioritized relationship-building and required permission from the subject(s) being photographed.
ICONOGRAPHY
Because TER was still a young brand with only a handful of creatives at the wheel, it did not have a custom icon library at the point that these guidelines were established. For this initial stage of brand refinement, the key focus was to gather the icons that were already in play into a single collection, define what they represented, how they should be used, and get everyone, including third-party partners, access to the same collection.
