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Design a visual identity

How to design a brand kit for your movement
Last update: Nov 10, 2022
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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

Why is visual identity important: Visual identity is an important part of any movement's marketing strategy. It needs to be recognisable, simple and memorable.

What should be included in the design of a visual identity for activist groups? Talk about how to design an activist movement logo, colours.

  • The logo of an activist movement should be simple and iconic in order to be easily recognisable and memorable. It should include the name of the movement and a symbol that represents its core values.
  • It is important to choose the colours carefully. They should match the values of the movement, but also be able to stand out against other logos in a crowded space.
  • The language used in the design of the logo should also reflect its core values

Colours

Create a Unique Palette

One good way to ensure professionalism is through use of colours for a certain purpose. Palettes are a colour scheme for social media posts, aimed at standardizing background and text colours. Using these ensures that thereโ€™s a throughline between related posts, such as using a certain palette (with associated colours) for a single campaign or event.

Using palettes is good practice in creating more of a brand identity. Palettes also ensure that colours used in a post largely work together, and donโ€™t create any unfortunate difficulties, especially for those with visual disabilities

Palette Example

From left to right

  • Used as the main colour, usually for the background of the post
  • Used as the secondary colour, often for secondary headlines
  • Used as accent colours, for bolded words, underlines, text boxes, etc
  • White, black, or one of the palette colours can be used as

Selecting Colours

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

  • 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, etc)
  • Something that works based on tone - dark colours may not work in a campaign for childrenโ€™s park, but light pastels may work better

Color theory is well researched, and there are a variety of resources online describing this. (https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory)

https://coolors.co/?home allows random generation of palettes, as well as generating them based on existing photos

https://www.schemecolor.com/ has a variety of palettes associated with certain themes, such as danger (https://www.schemecolor.com/principles-in-danger.php), feminist (https://www.schemecolor.com/wearing-feminism.php), and the environment (https://www.schemecolor.com/clean-the-environment.php)

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