Vegan Hacktivists

BRAND IDENTITY, WEB DESIGN, ILLUSTRATIONS, SOCIAL MEDIA GRAPHICS

The Project

Vegan Hacktivists (VH) is a global community of passionate animal advocates offering their skills across technology, development, and data. They deliver innovative and quality services at no cost to advocates and organizations. Their team and volunteer network is composed of highly-skilled and professional software engineers, data scientists, and content creators.

Our Approach

VH needed a brand that reflected their professional and expert skills, while remaining fun and casual for their volunteer base. Since the vast majority of their volunteers contribute their skills outside of their full-time job, the VH community culture needed to feel safe, fun, and collaborative in order to not feel like “another job” to their valuable talent base. Our approach to their branding was to lean on this “hacker” aesthetic using pixels and bold color and other elements for depth and personality.

The Logo

The original VH logo was created by a volunteer from the early days of VH’s inception, but it lacked flexibility and clarity. Without changing the heart of the logo, we cleaned up the vector lines and created a full kit of typography orientations to make the mark as flexible as possible. The logo package includes versions that work on light and dark backgrounds, with taglines and without, horizontal and crest versions, and an abbreviated version.

Brand Identity

The brand color palette is inspired by the existing VH teams at the time – all named after fruits and vegetables, assigned by fun emojis in the VH discord. Teams broccoli, banana, mango, peach, strawberry, watermelon, eggplant, and blueberry inspired the VH color palette. Today, VH has grown beyond these teams, but they still are reflected in the core palette as a way to infuse the brand with creative flair and casual personality.

Pixels

At the heart of the VH brand is the pixel motif – it’s used in grayscale for a more subtle background effect, or in full color for a bolder look. It’s highly unique among the animal advocacy space and stands out boldly. This simple shape very clearly represents VH’s tech and data origins and services.

Typography Style

We established a typography style for bold statements and taglines – some letters include a pixel glitch effect as another way to tie in the pixel motif.

Icon Sets

One of the first pieces of the VH brand we created were these pixel icons of the fruit/vegetable teams, and the animals. They are modeled after pixel video game sprites, again to appeal to VH’s developer volunteer base and create a much more fun community feel. The animals were animated to add movement to the website and other digital materials.

Social Media Graphics

We created a suite of social media templates using these brand elements to help VH’s social feed look engaging and enticing for recruiting volunteers as well as promoting their services.

Website Design

The web design brings together all the brand elements and shows off just how fun and bold this brand can be. With alternating high-contrast sections and pops of colorful pixels, the nature of their work shines through.

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