Defy Disaster
The Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) is a multifaceted organization that leverages the power of the entertainment industry to raise awareness and funds for important issues. They were launching a new nonprofit dedicated to disaster relief aid and needed a name as well as a logo, visual identity, and website. The challenge was to come up with a name and brand that represented multiple parts of the organization (preparedness, immediate disaster relief, and long term recovery), fit in with EIF's other organizations, and was eye-catching to a energetic audience of entertainment individuals. Through the entire process we worked closely with EIF to create a brand that invigorates and prepares its audience for a myriad of possible disasters (which 2020 promptly put to the test!)
Creative direction: YYES
ROLE:
Naming
Concept
Design
Animation
Video Editing
Web Design
Extensive brainstorming, collaboration, and research was done in the process of choosing a name. We wanted to ensure that the name carried the appropriate tone for the brand and that it wouldn't conflict with any existing organizations in the space. Eventually we settled on "Defy Disaster" for its confident, daring quality and the pleasing alliteration.
Once we had a name, many sketches were done to explore how to represent the qualities of the brand in a logo. A breakthrough came when we discovered that the double 'D' of the name could be turned into a symbol of two people with arms linked, standing united. The heads were incorporated into the word mark as a colon and a bold, condensed typeface finished it off.
We chose a pairing of typefaces to be used for the identity materials and developed a one-color logo and icon. Neon green and black communicates the urgency of the brand as well as standing out from EIF's existing nonprofits' branding.
The colon element of the logo allowed us to expand it into a flexible extension system, for use during specific disaster relief efforts.
Web Design
With branding done, Defy Disaster needed a website to serve as a hub for current disaster information and fundraising, past efforts, preparedness resources, and media coverage. The challenge was to prioritize urgent content, as well as present the same content in multiple places in a clear way.
A site map was laid out to guide organization.
In order to be prepared for any type and quantity of content, we wireframed three levels of response detail pages to ensure those that had a lot of content or little content would not appear either too crowded or to be missing content.
We applied the circles from the logo as photo containers and used the brand green sparingly throughout to create a clean and modern UI. Yellow was chosen as a donate link color to stand out from other links on the site.
Different modules were created for presenting the responses, depending on whether they appear on the home page or the responses page. An algorithm was included to ensure the "catch all" section at the bottom of the page did not include responses that were in previous sections.
Video loops were created for headers and the site was optimized for mobile.
