Refugee Women’s Alliance Redesign
As part of an introductory visual design class, we were assigned a local Seattle non-profit whose brand could use a refresh. The options were slightly limited, but I choose to redesign Refugee Women’s Alliance (ReWA), which is a non-profit in Seattle with a focus on providing programs refugee women and their families. I had actually volunteered with ReWA my freshman year of college, so I was very excited by the change of designing for a group that I was already familiar with.
The final results of ReWA’s new brand style guidelines can be found in the interactive slideshow, below or you can view the PDF brand book here. This brand book covers starts with an understand of what ReWA is through their mission statement and communication goals. Then it covers the new logo design, followed by a collection of 6 new icons for the brand, as well as the updated color scheme and typographic scheme, and some imagery standards. Then there is one mobile flow for a user interaction. Last, but not least, there is some fun swag items and a style tile!
REFLECTION
The biggest aspect of this ReWA Brand Redesign, that still resounds with me is the intense number of iterations I went through during the design process to get to the final logo I used in brand book. Below is a chart that highlights the changes the ReWA logo underwent during the redesign process.
The only aspect of the current ReWA logo that really stands out is the faces that appear in the lines of the butterfly wings, which humanizes the brand as a charitable organization. But, apart from the hidden butterfly, the current ReWA logo looks incredibly cluttered, as if it had been made using the word art features in Microsoft Word. Additionally, no where in their current logo does it tell the user what the actual name of the organization is, it only gives the acronym. Although they almost exclusively use their short name “ReWA” when referring to their organization, someone who isn’t familiar with the organization has no way to know that, which could potentially lead to confusion and a loss in visibility within the community.
My initial redesign of the logo seeks to still keep the humanistic aspects of their current logo, while adding a more simplistic and minimal touch. The butterfly in this design definitely looks rough. As for the text, it seems a little bit too thin for a wordmark, and it is positioned quite awkwardly.
The final logo that I created refined the shape of the butterfly wing, added some symmetry to the logo, and added the monarch colors to the butterfly, as well as the rich purple instead of black for the lettering, which hearkens to the current color scheme being used. This final design also upgraded the butterfly so that the long line in the “R” doubles as a body for the butterfly, which simplifies the logo, and makes the text positioning look far cleaner.
In the future, I might experiment with a more square shaped logo, and possibly multiple variations of the logo to be used in multiple contexts. All in all I’m fairly content with the logo that I created for ReWA.
