What It Was Like Redesigning the Nurturing Minds Logo
Written by Cory Van Andel
Explore Cory’s other great designs on her portfolio website.
About a year ago, Nurturing Minds’ Executive Director Laura DeDominicis called me up to ask if I’d be interested in working with the communications committee to develop a new logo. Nurturing Minds had recently wrapped up its 10th anniversary celebrations, and I had just finished my last year of college and was about to spend three months as a volunteer at SEGA. (This was the exact situation a fresh design graduate hopes to be in—engaging work pouring in before the diploma has even arrived in the mail.) The goal was simple enough: retain the elements of the original logo—girls, education, Africa—but update it aesthetically and make it adaptable to various settings.
I was a little nervous to take this on as part of my volunteer duties at SEGA because I’d never made a logo for so large an audience, plus the work of Nurturing Minds is so crucial for SEGA’s students and families. This project, if weighty, was still really exciting for me because I knew two things:
My aunt Ange is the Secretary of the Nurturing Minds Board of Directors, and I gathered the committee had spoken to her before reaching out to me. Ange takes her work with Nurturing Minds really seriously—so despite our family connection, I knew she wouldn’t have recommended me if she didn’t have faith I could handle it.
I would be able to experience something not a lot of graphic designers get the chance to—designing a logo for a nonprofit while at the epicenter of their work in action.
It was clear Nurturing Minds had decided to take a chance on me—I definitely didn’t want to mess this one up. When I got to SEGA, I started researching other nonprofits’ logos and making sketches of things I saw around campus. Something that caught my eye right away was the cleverness and intricacy of Tanzanian art and fabrics—it was like any opportunity to be visually boring was simply not taken. I think this principle seeped into my design process, because before sending off my first round of ideas I remember tossing out several of what I considered to be my most simplistic designs. I, too, was not going to take this opportunity to be boring.
While I was pleased with everything I sent to the committee, I couldn’t have been more relieved when they wrote back saying they wanted to pursue my favorite of the six designs—a gestalt of a graduating student whose face is also the African continent. And honestly, I felt like I had won the lottery when that idea first crossed my mind. As soon as I thought of it I spent hours researching related designs, convinced that someone else must have thought of it first. Miraculously, no one had, which meant we were free to pursue this illustration in the logo!
From here we began the refinement process. Something unique about this project was that we truly had the luxury of time—I wasn’t working under a contract that limited the number of iterations we could go through and we didn’t set any hard deadlines. I would email the committee several variations of the design at a time, then we would discuss, come to a consensus, and move on to the next round of edits. Some changes from the initial design included removing facial features from the profile (simplifies the design and allows people to imagine the face for themselves), moving the tassel to the left of the cap (makes the icon smaller, uses negative space, and indicates that she has graduated) and switching to lowercase letters (uppercase doesn’t feel nearly as friendly).
The next step was to add color. We decided on purple and yellow/orange because they’re complimentary colors which naturally please the eye. Plus they were already part of Nurturing Minds’ brand colors and we liked the connotations they carried. In contemporary Western logos, purple frequently represents groups that are either on the cutting edge or center around women (or both). Orange and yellow are known to help organizations appear modern, youthful, and vivacious. We also wanted to be aware of these colors’ meanings in Tanzania and Subsaharan Africa as a whole. We were excited to learn that orange can correlate to vitality or wealth, and purple tends to represent royalty and prosperity. This color combo felt fresh, but we also knew it had the potential to become a classic. We decided to include the orange to yellow gradient because it felt more interesting and alive than flat orange. After a bit more fine-tuning, our logo was finally ready for launch! The last thing I got to do was redesign the logo section of the Nurturing Minds style guide—a booklet that contains all of this organization’s graphic design rules.
While working on this project, one thing I gained was clarity on what to do when my idea of what’s best clashes with the client’s. As a student I was used to appeasing the client (my professor), while my heroes in the field encourage designers to “just say no”. I figured out that the best move for me is to still pursue whatever the committee decides, but only after explaining why I think my idea is the way to go. Sometimes I convinced them and sometimes not, but they always valued my insight and thanked me for taking the time to write out my thoughts. I loved working with members of the communications committee—a successful launch wouldn’t be possible without such an intelligent and cooperative committee.
Thanks also to my aunt Ange, my roommate/co-worker/supervisor/stand-in-mom Cindy at SEGA, and the rest of my family for their support. Thank you to the students and staff at SEGA for being the north star of the logo and everything Nurturing Minds does, and to the friends and design students who entertained me asking “what’s the first thing you see when you look at this?” over and over again. I’m so satisfied with our outcome. As an organization, Nurturing Minds has grown a lot in the past 10+ years, but the core of the mission remains the same. A lot of experts recommend a logo refresh every 10 years—my hope for this logo is that it’s effective enough to stick around for the next 10 to come.
If you are as inspired by our new logo as we are, let us know in the comments below!