Like the world, We Are Open Co-op has changed a lot in the past year. We welcomed members back, we added a new member, we got really, really busy helping organizations big and small do off the cuff digital transformation in response to the global pandemic.
We also started rebranding.
WHAT!? A NEW BRAND!?
Yep, earlier this year we worked together to do a branding exercise. Our original branding and general vibe has developed over the years in an organic way, so we thought it was a good time to take a step back. We started by surveying how all members thought about ourselves, each other and the co-op brand. We started by asking members to list their own “genius skills”, what are we, individually, really good at?
◦ Connected threads amongst us:
◦ Connectors of people, ideas, things
◦ Able to swiftly get to the core of something
◦ Remove barriers and limits through what we see/hear and can do
◦ Idea generators
◦ Empathy
We saw some consistent themes throughout our branding exercise. Things we work on, our kinds of input, and the impacts we see in our work.
◦ Global, strategic initiatives — influencing decision-makers on large scale change
◦ Creative input, shaping narratives/storytelling
◦ Far-reaching impact
◦ Simplifying the complex and creating clear strategic plans
We then looked at our logo, and determined that it might be time for a redesign, so we sent our resident artist, Bryan Mathers, to work. We gave him a series of words and associations, and he took our inputs and proposed three routes forward.
Route 1: These Letters Belong Together
Often our clients refer to us in short form as “WAO”. We, ourselves, often use “WAO” when short forming, so Route 1, which is ultimately the route we decided to take, was playing with the forms of these letters in an effort to move us towards a new, more streamlined and minimized logo.
Route 2: Bring Me Sunshine
During our survey, we found that the cooperative vibe is often positive and friendly, so Bryan did a couple of drafts playing with bringing the form of a sun into the logo. Despite our love of the vibe, we found that this direction often brought a sort of childishness to the mark.
Route 3: Oh my goodness there’s a landscape in our logo!
Bryan also played around with a full landscape, bringing in earth, water and air elements. This work led us into a discussion about color. So while we didn’t use the logo elements from this route, it ultimately helped us choose our new color palette.
The color palette
There are a lot of colors in the world, and we had quite a time narrowing ourselves down to some main colors we’d like to use. To get started we put our in-use color spectrums together. We then immediately eliminated some colors, like the Learning fractal light blue, which we thought must have been a mistake as it was only fractions away from the WAO light blue.
We used the Coloors.co tool to help us find palettes, and eventually we narrowed ourselves down to the two blues we’ve used in the past, and a green, yellow and reddish color to round out the palette:
Moving forward
We’re still working at working on integrating our branding decisions in various places across the internet, including on our own website. For now, we’re putting this work on the back burner as we all have a great deal of other things going on. We did, however, want to make sure we shared this brief update so that when you see our new logo and brand elements starting to be used, you didn’t feel confused about who we are.
We are our members :)