The Greenpeace UK Brand Identity and Communications Strategy
I visited the London offices of Greenpeace a few days ago and saw that the Brand Identity I created for them a few years ago is still very much in use. Our site wouldn’t be complete without a post on this project so here is the story of that project. What follows is an account of the project, interspersed with examples of designs created during and since. For the sake of brevity I’ve omitted much of the exploratory work which went into the making the identity. If you’d like to see some of that too then let me know.
The project came out of a request to design a new set of stationery for Greenpeace UK. So I asked what seemed a natural question, “what am I to base my designs on?” The answer was interesting, there were no design guidelines. I proposed a project to resolve this lack of guidance and the Greenpeace UK Publications team agreed. Because of the way Greenpeace comms. were organised at the time I was to focus on creating an offline brand identity, making reference to what could be done online but not actually designing for it.
The project kicked off with interviews of key stakeholders within Greenpeace to establish a holistic view of the organisation’s visual communications. I asked after how they felt about Greenpeace, the organisation’s personality, it’s methods and it’s existing branded communications. I also probed for understandings of the organisation’s creative processes and work-flows.
These interviews, along with an audit of existing designs and independent research into the history, culture and future of campaigning, informed all the creative decisions which were to come.
Myself, John Sauven and the then Greenpeace Publications manager Stokely Webster identified the kind of ideas, guidance and assets the organisation required to become an effective, branded communicator.
The project was to deliver; a new Communication Strategy, Brand Statements to express organisational and campaign goals, guidance on Logo usage, a Colour Palette and some Typographic rules. All this was to be brought together in a Style Guide, to be created in-house by the Publications team.
I’ve had many opportunities to create Branded Communications for Greenpeace since this project and have included a few of these at the bottom of this post.
A Communication Strategy
[nggallery id=34]
The new brand had to be borne of a shared vision of who Greenpeace’s audiences actually were. We recognised that the key constituencies of Greenpeace are;
The Powerful; politicians and industry leaders
Supporters; the people who give time money and expertise to Greenpeace
Allies; organisations, groups and individuals with whom Greenpeace share goals.
I helped Greenpeace to establish an easy-to-relate Positioning statement to guide us through the project and to frame their future communications, it is:
Intervene > Engage > Transform.
Thereafter every single campaign action and piece of communication was to speak to at least one of those three descriptors.
The new Communication Strategy grew from being part of the brand project into it’s own fully fledged piece of work, becoming a guide to the strategy which sat alongside the brand identity guidance.
Brand Statements
[nggallery id=38]
Publishing organisational mission statements is normally a cue to induce sleep but for Greenpeace it was apparent that by being an environmental protagonist they should make their motivations clear at all times. Prior to this project Greenpeace had assumed that readers would know, by deed and image why they were involved in an issue. These new statements did away with that assumption and stated in absolute terms, ‘this is why we act’.
The organisational statement Positive change through action came out of long consideration of what Greenpeace really exists to do and how it operates. There were three versions of the statement, the first being that one-liner, the second and third versions were progressively longer and more fully describe the organisation.
We decided that each campaign should have it’s own statement – a paragraph making the campaign goals clear whilst relating that issue back Greenpeace’s organisation-wide values.
These campaign statements appear on printed campaign materials. They have become part of Greenpeace’s process for clarifying the aims and objectives of each campaign. Each campaign had to be summed up in a few sentences, and if it can’t then it’s not ready to go public.
Using the Logo
[nggallery id=39]
The Greenpeace logo is incredibly we recognised, after all they’ve been parading it on ships and at well publicised direct actions since the early 1908′s when it was drawn by Patrick Garaude. It was decided very early on that the purpose of this project was not to redesign it, but we needed to make it’s use consistent as individual designers and campaigners were recolouring it as they saw fit – with no logic to make sense of the variation.
We established Pantone 363U (and CMYK and RGB equivalents) as Greenpeace green. We chose this green for two reasons. It has a natural and healthy feel, avoiding the hippy, fluorescent connotations of acidic bright greens and the artificial plasticity of minty greens. It’s hue is also quite dense so it could be used to print text when using just one colour.
When Greenpeace wanted to show the logo in other colours these were to be limited to black and white. Both are practical with black oft used in printing and white reversing well out of colours and images.
It was vital to ensure that the logo was always displayed clearly, not pushed into spaces where it’s value would be diminished, so I recreated the logo with a simple frame surrounding it. Whenever a designer placed the logo on a page they would see it within this frame and know what space to give it.
The Colour Palette
[nggallery id=36]
For Greenpeace colour is synonymous with The Rainbow which adorns their ships which traverse the planet so we wanted to create a palette which was varied. To form the Primary palette we took the colours used on the logo – green, black and white – and added blue and orange. The former representing water, the latter to be worn by activists involved in direct actions as well as to be used as accent colour online.
Secondary and Tertiary palettes were created to work in concert with the core colours. The former, bright signifying mainly specific campaigns, andthe latter mainly pale colours and greys provided as a backdrop for the primary and colours.
Greenpeace green, orange and light grey are used to great effect on the Greenpeace UK website.
Typography
[nggallery id=35]
As with the colour, the variety of type Greenpeace were using prior to this project was varied and inconsistent, my audit revealed some 11 fonts used on just 20 documents. Type selection had to be rationalised and so we selected a few and set down some principles.
We decided to steer clear of the trend for having just one font for all media thinking it to be too conventional for such an unconventional organisation and inadequate for it’s needs – we agreed that reports would look awful in Georgia, Times New Roman (yuk) or Arial.
Foundry Sterling was selected to be the primary font of the brand. A sans font with requisite elan and a full family of styles and weights made it useful for everything from printed banners right through to reports.
Helvetica was selected to be used on-screen as it’s the system font visually closest to Sterling.
We recognised the need for using other fonts from time-to-time and so we set out guidance which allowed for that, so long as there was a compelling reason to break with style. A good example of this is the ‘UK’s worst fish retailer’ campaign of 2006 in which I helped Greenpeace to mock the Morrisons brand.
Style Guide
The style guide brought together the guidance, principles and rules developed during the project in one simple to use ring-bound document. This document is widely used within Greenpeace in the UK and beyond.
Branded communications since
[nggallery id=37]
Aside from the stationery which in part led to this project starting, Greenpeace often launches new campaigns which require new branded communications; briefings and reports, leaflets, banners, flags, stickers, t-shirts – I could fill the web with examples but above are just a select few of my designs which use the Brand Identity.
If your organisation, campaign or business is thinking about it’s branding I’d be happy to discuss your needs with you. Call Paul on +44 (0)20 8299 6523 or email me.
