New Era, New Brand: the whys, hows & whats of our brand refresh journey

This week, Learning Equality is announcing some exciting updates that usher in a new era for our organization. Each day, we’re elaborating on a different aspect of this ‘new era’, providing additional details and context. This blog post, the second in the series, is dedicated to our new brand identity, and the journey taken by our organization to get us there.

When you think about Learning Equality, you may think first and foremost about Kolibri, or vice versa. However, the relationship between these two entities has not always been clear from a visual identity perspective — so much so that Kolibri is often taken as being the organization, completely separate from Learning Equality, and not its flagship product. So if you didn’t know one or the other, simply examining each logo would make it virtually impossible to make the association between the two.

Historically, the two brands have operated with distinct styles, resulting in a visual disconnect. While we did our best to make it work for quite a long time, the clash between disparate colors and logos was something that needed to be addressed. We needed to elevate our brands and more easily convey the relationship between the organization, Learning Equality, and the product, Kolibri. Not only that, we also needed to make Kolibri feel more playful and colorful — a piece of feedback we’ve received from our community for a number of years — so we duly obliged.

That is why I’m thrilled to unveil the new Learning Equality branding system. More than a redesign, it is a strategic alignment of our brands to best reflect our values and match the leadership position our organization has come to occupy over the past 11 years.

Diving into the brand refresh process

With the initial assistance of graphic design agency In-House International, we kicked off our brand refresh work with the goal of creating a unified visual identity that not only addressed the aforementioned challenges but also propelled us into this ‘new era’ on the best possible footing.

The process started with an extensive needs assessment which included interviews with our dedicated staff and key community stakeholders, alongside rigorous market research to audit our existing brand with an eye towards the future. In this phase, we gained invaluable insights into how our organization and products were perceived.

The audit revealed a positive resonance with our mission, values, and team. Our activities and communications genuinely reflected our aspirations and had rightfully earned the pride of our stakeholders. This was very good news, as no amount of graphic design can fake an organization’s true practice of its values — and this assessment demonstrated that there was transparent alignment on Learning Equality’s mission, values, processes and character. The brand audit also confirmed the need for greater synergy between the Learning Equality and Kolibri brands. Historically developed virtually independently– in an ad hoc style — the lack of cohesion was consistently cited as being detrimental to overall brand awareness and brand equity.

With these insights at hand, we then delved into the brand development phase. We worked on brand architecture, values, voice, logos, color palette, typeface, photography, illustration, as well as communication and promotional assets. All of which were to be aggregated into a brand book, conceived as a living document. And thankfully so… Upon receiving the outputs for the brand book, we realized we would need to make quite a few adjustments in order to have something that properly met our needs.

So in alignment with our core value of constant improvement, we rolled up our sleeves and went to work to develop the Learning Equality Brand Book in house. This internal document is the result of a close collaboration between our communications and design teams. It houses a comprehensive set of messaging, original and adapted collateral materials and revised usage guidelines that serve to inform Learning Equality team members on how to best communicate and represent our brands at any and all times.

We then extracted the assets and guidelines required for our community to do the same, creating the externally-facing Learning Equality Branding Guidelines. In this freely available document, we share boilerplate language about Learning Equality and Kolibri, our brand architecture, values, logos, and logo usage guidelines.

Zooming in on our logos

First, let me clarify that at Learning Equality, we define ‘brand’ as much more than a name or a logo. For us, a brand extends to the feeling our audience and community get when they use our products and services, read our communications or interact with our organization. In a nutshell, it can be illustrated as this:

Source: Invictus Studio

In the same vein, ‘branding’ is every action we take to invariably deliver on our organizational and brand promises with the aim of consistently building trust and evoking positive feelings in those with whom we interact. So while the logos we’re sharing below are a key part of our brands, they’re not all of it. But visual identities are always fun to look at, so I hope it elicits the emotions that we’ve intended for them to evoke!

Out with the old, in with the new

The newly created logos are part of a much more polished and cohesive visual identity that not only elevates, but also bridges the Learning Equality and Kolibri brands, making their mutual association a lot more prominent and clear:

Here’s a breakdown of each logo component:

1. The Learning Equality wordmark incorporates sharp angles in some of its letters to subliminally communicate innovation, openness, and trustworthiness. The color black was deliberately chosen to reinforce the idea of solidity, trust, strength, restraint, and sophistication.
2. The logomark is a dynamic, human and fun graphic element that carries different meanings for different people: Some see the script-style abbreviation “LE”, others see a brain, a teacher and pupil, and even a light bulb. All possible meanings stem from ideas, education, movement. What do you see?
3. In contrast to the more solid and angular wordmark, the yellow “blob” has been developed as an organic visual element that unites the LE and Kolibri brands, embodying the value of humanity, and encouraging constant evolution, transformation. The yellow was chosen because of its association with learning, creativity, intellect, happiness, and positivity.

1. The Kolibri wordmark uses the same typeface as Learning Equality’s, with angled stems to subliminally evoke the brand’s innovative and transformative emotions. Here, we deliberately chose the color blue because of its association with technology, education, imagination and intuition.
2. The beloved hummingbird logomark with Wi-Fi wings from the previous logo has been preserved but modernized. A softer stroke line has been used for optimized legibility and cohesiveness with the LE logomark. The hummingbird icon conveys pollination, playfulness, and connection.

Aside from these, there are alternate logos with different orientation, monochrome versions and black and white. The brand elements also include a vibrant color palette, different shaped ‘blob’ graphics for illustrations and photography, which you’ll see across our materials from here on out.

What’s next

We are immensely proud of what we have accomplished in developing and implementing this new brand identity and excited to embody it along the road ahead. As a next step, we’ll be further developing our new website and finalizing the rebrand of our guidance and collateral materials.

I invite you to experience our new brand, and encourage you to drop us a message on socials to let us know what you thought of our new look. And stay tuned for the last installment of the ‘new era’ series: Kolibri: The Android App release!