Branding with a clear purpose
Diverse sections of the population - from an ethnic minority or the LGBT community, women, the young, the old, and especially the disabled - are often underrepresented. Government, media, corporations and even NGO’s often struggle to understand fully how people from diverse backgrounds think and feel.
It is a problem the founders of startup Versiti knew all too well. They had built up considerable experience in this area as the owners of an already successful market research company. They knew if they could bring their knowledge and networks together to focus on this niche area they could build a very successful business and do good in society at the same time. All they needed was a great brand and website to deliver it.
When they came to us they didn’t even have a name for their new venture. Huddle came up with the name Versiti. Let’s be honest, that wasn’t the hard part. What was much harder was how to represent the challenges that Versiti can help resolve.
The Versiti logo also features the Equal by Definition icon but we didn’t stop there. To reflect that something is missing from society we also removed small sections of the type. The idea is that together with their clients, Versiti can work towards making society more inclusive, more whole, more intact and complete.
To deliver the excitement and opportunity possible by truly engaging with diverse audiences, we created a visual language using a suite of specially designed icons. Within the icons we embedded a recurring theme, three lines or three objects that represented Versiti’s core belief, we are all ‘Equal by Definition.’
On their website you’ll notice there is the use of a lot of green, with critical paths picked out in red. This is deliberate - the green represents ‘messaging to the mass population’ and the red is how often a diverse population is reached out to. Take a look at the top section of each website page or the back of the business cards, for example.
There is a huge disparity in scale. But didn’t we mention women and the young and the old as being ‘diverse’? That’s the problem in a nutshell - women may make up 51% of the UK population, but does their voice have equal representation? That’s Versiti’s mission, and we think the brand we created for them goes at least some way to delivering that.
