Going Forward, a New Look for ESD
Earlier this year, the Elders for Sound Democracy leadership team embarked on a branding effort for all their communications: written, printed, online, etc. And, around mid-March, we began a soft introduction of the new ESD look with the slide presentation at our March Community Meeting.
Today, we introduce the logo and its new style to our readership in this, our April Newsletter. We’d like to share with you how we arrived at this design.
We set out with several objectives for the branding logo. 1.) We wanted to show a tie in to both our parent organization, Elders Action Network, and our sister project, Elders Climate Action. We achieved that by using the orange 3D globe similar to EAN’s logo which also echoes the round shape of the tree in the ECA logo. 2.) For democracy, it’s hard to come up with a better iconic image than Lady Liberty. The freedoms that come with democracy are her welcoming arms to the “tired,” the “poor,” and the “huddled masses.” 3.) The stacking of the organization’s name provides the “sound” base supporting democracy (Lady Liberty)—which we constantly strive to preserve for today, tomorrow and the future. 4.) The color theme represents strong, bold colors to reflect our strong and bold efforts.
We’ve also transitioned to using a serif font (Georgia) for headlines and sans serif (Arial) for body copy to create a visual identity for our work. Arial is a relatively common font because it does a couple of things very well: its lowercase characters compared to its caps are taller than most fonts and the character spacing used to form the words makes for easy reading. Readability is very important when your messages are very important.
We hope you enjoy our new branding efforts.