In the summer of 2023, Youth Alive now had the budget for more substantial website updates. I was approached by Joey Yang at Third Slant to revisit this project.

Based on initial conversations with our client counterpart, we understood that the issues I’d previously uncovered of unclear program descriptions, navigation, information architecture, and dated aesthetics had not yet been fully solved.

Additionally, two larger political events drove new urgency in this work:

• Oakland was facing a $360 million budget shortfall, where funding for community violence intervention was one of the many areas considered for budget cuts

• As part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Biden administration announced nearly $500 million dollars in grant funding for Community Violence Intervention programs

To guide this work, we asked Youth Alive what goals they wanted to achieve while updating their brand. They told us these goals were their primary priorities:

• Youth Alive wanted to make sure they could clearly communicate their work, its scope, and its impact to funders, not just within the city of Oakland, but to other grant-making organizations to give the organization the best chance at financial stability

• Youth Alive wanted to claim the mantle of leadership in Community Violence Intervention, as they were one of the original community organizations creating new violence intervention methods over the 30 years of its operation, now used across the country and across the world

Youth Alive’s new Executive Director indicated his willingness to re-examine the brand holistically, so we proposed a complete brand refresh to establish the brand’s foundation, including mission, vision, and visual and verbal identity.

Staff Workshop #1

In early fall we invited a cross-section of Youth Alive staff to a workshop to re-imagine what their brand could be.

Staff from each program and administrative department were invited to participate in a brand foundation workshop.  The goal of this workshop was to establish the brand’s foundation, including defining the organization’s mission, vision, and core values. 

After some fun icebreakers, we ran 3 exercises to understand different ways to describe and learn more about Youth Alive.

• Elevator pitch: Youth Alive staff were asked to write an elevator pitch for this organization; a brief introduction getting across a key point or two and making a connection.

• Functional vs. Emotional benefits: What does this organization do for its clients, and what kind of feelings does that create?

• Dreamscaping: Finally, Youth Alive staff were asked to describe the world in which the organization has succeeded in its goals.

We were lucky to hear from Youth Alive staff and their journeys as young people, and adults living in Oakland and working for Youth Alive. A refrain we heard, again and again, was “This work is personal to me”. Staff have first-hand experience with violence, with intervention, and with the healing work they now perform with and for their neighbors. Each person felt a sense of duty and purpose in making this change for Oakland.

While I understood what Youth Alive’s work and goals were from an outside perspective, I was deeply impacted by the personal stories and the grace with which the staff diligently work day to day to create a better city. Hearing how deeply the staff cared about their work and their clients, we knew that the Youth Alive brand had to reflect the personalities, attitudes and dedication.

Research

We wanted the new brand identity of Youth Alive to reflect the brand’s personality. We wanted the authenticity and passion of local movements and revolutionaries to inspire this new aesthetic. We wanted to do this research because we heard a lot of love for the city of Oakland. This brand should reflect the grassroots energy of the town. We decided to seek inspiration from local movements and figures. Our workshop participants cited local movements in the city of Oakland. To make sure that we understood the cultural context that our participants were citing, we decided to start our local research at the Oakland public library on Telegraph Ave. We asked the librarian for references on local history. While they had some reference material, they recommended the library’s main branch and their history room.

Based on that recommendation, Joey and I took a trip to the Oakland Public Library’s main branch History room where we were able to view photos, posters, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, ephemera, and exhibits showing the Black Panther Party, Vietnam protests, labor organizing, and Black Lives Matter.

The librarian from the Oakland Library history room also recommended the Chavez Library Poster Collection which houses ~250 posters made by local artists and activists.

Out participants described the feelings of safety and community as young people in Oakland. We wanted to draw inspiration from the Oakland’s singular culture.

We also drew inspiration from other violence prevention organizations at the local and national level. We hoped to follow convention, and be guided by how other orgs have structured information and calls to action on their own websites. We were inspired by March for our Lives, Giffords Center to End Gun Violence, Roots Community Health Center and HAVI.

To create copy and brand guidelines that were held close to the feelings we wanted to convey, we drafted Youth Alive’s Mission, Vision, and a brand star of 5 values Youth Alive represented, based on what we heard from our workshop participants. This brand foundation would dictate the direction we would go to create the rest of the elements of the brand.  

Our goal in drafting updates to these was to simplify them to be easily shared and remembered by staff and Youth Alive’s partners including clients, elected officials, and peer organizations.

Based on different expressions of the organizations core values, we created three brand concepts for Youth Alive.

Design

Staff Workshop #2

We asked Youth Alive staff to join us for a second workshop. We presented the brand foundations of Mission, Vision, Values and our three brand visual explorations for review. 

We showed the YA team our draft versions of the updated mission, vision, and values, and while the team agreed with the general direction of each of these, we updated certain phrases to more accurately reflect the work done across the agency and its goals.

“We want to make people happier & more hopeful but what YA actually does is make people safer”

“We provide services for those impacted by violence  - naming that this is how we see the work we do - when i’m talking about YA with somebody i bring out the [program] buckets really quickly”

Next we shared our visual design explorations. To encourage the YA team to give us their unfiltered opinion, we made it clear nothing was precious and prompted them to speak candidly about what they liked, disliked, and wanted to see.The vital feedback from YA staff provided honest feedback. 

• Didn’t want to be confused with the city

• The purpose of the organization might not have been identifiable enough from just the visual identity

• They liked the green color because it reminded them of Oakland

• They needed the identity to work in the streets and represent what they do

• There was a lot of emotional attachment to the existing logo]

Based on this feedback, and based on Youth Alive’s goal of claiming the mantle of leadership within the CVI movement, we decided to continue using their existing logo with several modifications to give the letterforms more consistent shape and spacing and update the primary brand color to green to reflect Youth Alive’s roots in Oakland.

We presented these three options in a second workshop for Youth Alive staff to review and give their feedback.

Based on the workshop feedback, Youth Alive’s redesign goals, and conversations with our primary client partners, we selected the most “relentless” brand identity direction, which was to  revise and extend their current brand, while updating and expanding the brand standards for brand foundation, visual identity, verbal identity, and brand application examples. 

Brand Foundation

We used the workshop feedback and the staff’s own words to create clear and concise statements for Youth Alive’s vision, mission, and values, so that they are memorable for staff and Youth Alive’s audiences.

This brand identity would also feature the original Youth Alive logo in the new signature Oak green to better represent the friendly, rooted experience of clients and staff versus the original red. With their relentless energy and work, we added a yellow Brass, bright pink Rose and grounding Infield.

Based on the organic and hand-drawn letterforms we were inspired by in our field research, we chose our hero typeface, Martin, by Vocal Type Co. “nonviolent” typeface inspired byMartin Luther King Jr. and signs created for the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. This rich historical reference also came with bold and asymmetric letterforms that speak to the relentless energy of Youth Alive.

Verbal Identity

In addition to the color palette, we provided Youth Alive with a reference for what colors can be used together for accessibility, where we vetted each color combination to make sure it met minimum Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards for contrast.

We created guidelines for Youth Alive’s verbal identity that highlighted the history and relentless dedication of the organization as well as the personal approach and authenticity of Youth Alive staff in an elevator pitch, value propositions for its audiences, and frameworks for the tone of new copy.

We created new brand assets including letterhead, business cards, flyers and merchandise mockups to make sure their new brand extended to all touchpoints with its audiences.