Violet Studios 2025 Year in Review
Kate Rodman, Violet Studios Co-Founder & Creative Director, reflects on the highlights and milestones of 2025
A Year of Refining How We Serve the Movement
While 2024 was our first year officially as Violet Studios, 2025 was a year of refinement and continuing to build on that foundation. We worked closely with our clients and partners to deepen our understanding of how we can best support all of you doing the critical work for animals within the parameters of our small but mighty team.
In 2025 we tested a new process: quarterly application windows instead of a constant stream of requests.
When we started Violet Studios, we received a constant stream of requests for our support, the evaluation of which pulled us away from our design work. Implementing the quarterly applications meant we could review all applications in a prioritization exercise four times per year, so we could fully evaluate all high-quality applications and not miss out on opportunities due to our limited bandwidth at the time they came in.
The new application process provided much needed structure for client intake, but we still faced the tough reality of having to turn away strong applications regularly because of our limited capacity.
Still, this didn't stop us from delivering services to as many organizations as we could and making sure groups have access to services that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.
Throughout 2025, we have been so grateful for the opportunities we had to support so many organizations doing incredible work for animals and collaborate on projects that feel authentic to your mission and team. We were honored by the number of applications we received and want to thank everyone for trusting us with your brands, websites, and messaging.
You all are the ones working every day to advocate for animals, change minds, and reshape our food system. We're honored to support you by shining a light on all of the work that you do.
Some Violet team members at AVA Summit 2025 in Los Angeles
In 2025, we expanded our communications services across the movement and built new partnerships with a clear focus: supporting organizations at pivotal moments in their growth and extending our reach to groups that often lack access to creative resources.
The stats you’ll find below are just numbers – what’s harder to quantify is our true impact:
Mentoring organizations at the most pivotal stage of their work – right when they're getting started and developing their strategy
Supporting groups in regions with limited resources, funding, and expert guidance, especially when they're one of the few (or sometimes the only) organizations in their country
Working with groups in locations where factory farming is becoming established – where their critical interventions are especially valuable
Helping groups avoid costly mistakes, sparing them not only high expenses but also time and energy spent heading in a direction that does not serve them
Helping organizations represent themselves the way they want to be seen by their audiences, so their messaging sticks
For a small team like ours, achieving what we did in 2025 wasn’t easy, but our designers stepped up to the challenge!
Violet Studios was founded on a shared commitment to animal protection and advocacy. We're a team of designers, strategists, and communicators who believe creative work will amplify the voices fighting for animals. The impact you're about to see was achieved by this tight team working to offer their expertise and fill gaps.
Stats – 2025
Orgs Served:
89
(All-time: 203)
Services Provided:
202
(All-time: 499)
Estimated value of services provided:
$528K
(All-time: $1.7M)
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We’ve estimated the cost we’re saving to organizations (and the movement) with our completely free services by calculating what the industry cost would’ve been if these organizations had gone to the market to receive the same support. For the pricing, we are referencing the design industry standard: The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines. The Graphic Artists Guild (GAG) has been the most reputable reference for professional design pricing in the world for decades; In fact, we think our estimate may be even undervalued, as the GAG updates their pricing guidelines every few years, and the last release was in 2021 — of course, market prices have only increased since then.
Served orgs on:
6 Continents
International: 37%
North America: 22%
Asia: 8%
Europe: 15%
Latin America: 5%
Oceania: 1%
Africa: 10%
Middle East: 2%
Logo Line-Up
Project Highlights
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AVA International
REBRANDING, WEBSITE
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Liberate in Mind
BRANDING, WEBSITE, ILLUSTRATIONS
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Food System Stewards
BRANDING, ILLUSTRATIONS, WEBSITE (LAUNCHING SOON!)
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Who Let The Docs Out
BRANDING, WEBSITE (LAUNCHING SOON!)
Motion Design Highlights
Check out our 2025 motion design reel, which showcases a mix of logo animations and other highlights from the year.
Our experienced motion designer Thomas brings these designs to life by turning static visuals into vibrant, breathing pieces.
Motion design not only adds depth to the designs but also expands on their meaning, strengthens their message, and quickly captures audience attention.
You can also check out the animated video we created for Animal Outlook below!
Testimonials
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Violet Studios helped us revamp our brand to make it more user-friendly, direct, visually appealing, and true to what we want to express as an organisation. It was a pleasure working with their team. Communication was smooth throughout, and they were always willing to make the necessary changes. They exceeded our expectations.
Sabina Bravo, Founder & Executive Director, Animal Law Focus
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Working with Violet Studios on AVA International’s rebrand was deeply transformative. Their team delivered a thoughtful, strategic, and beautifully structured identity system – from brand analysis and a complete logo family to website design, event assets, and document templates – all crafted to strengthen how we communicate and show up in the world.
This work will directly help animals by enabling us to reach, mobilize, and support far more advocates across regions. A clearer, more cohesive brand allows us to share critical knowledge more effectively, engage funders and partners with greater clarity, and create stronger, more accessible programs for people working to end the exploitation of farmed animals. With this rebrand, our movement-building efforts become more impactful and more scalable.
We’re grateful for Violet Studios’ partnership and highly recommend them.
Amie Albright, Head of Communications and Partnerships, AVA International
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Our rebrand process required time, patience, and an exceptional level of commitment. Even with the challenges we faced along the way (from scheduling constraints to language barriers and unexpected circumstances), the team at Violet Studios remained dedicated, thoughtful, and generous with their expertise.
For us, this rebrand stands as a powerful example of what true collaboration can achieve across borders, cultures, and contexts. It reflects a shared vision: building a world where all animals are respected. We truly admire Violet’s work, and we thank them for walking this path with us.
Alexia Dean, Director of Fundraising, Animal Libre
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Violet Studios created an animation that eloquently and compellingly explains Animal Outlook's theory of change – exactly what we needed to communicate our complex mission to diverse audiences.
But Thomas went beyond the brief. When he suggested adjusting our brand colors for the video, we were intrigued. The palette he proposed was so perfectly aligned with our mission that we've now adopted these new colors across our entire organization.
It's rare to find a creative partner who delivers both the project you asked for and the brand transformation you didn't know you needed. Violet Studios turned a video project into a complete visual identity evolution that will serve Animal Outlook for years to come.
Andrea Diaz, Operations Director, Dharma Voices for Animals
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Violet Studios is simply amazing. I couldn't believe how professional they were as they guided us through the process of creating a name, logo, and other assets for our new nonprofit. They were very responsive and thoughtful as they worked with us to come up with the name Animals Unbound.
Furthermore, the website they created went far beyond what we could have hoped for. Now when I see a fantastic website for a small nonprofit for animals, I scroll to the bottom and I often see it was made with love by Violet Studios. I can't recommend them highly enough.
Gregg Tully, CEO & Founder of Animals Unbound
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We are incredibly grateful to Violet Studios for designing our website. Under Kate Rodman's leadership, their team created a site that powerfully and clearly communicates our vegan mission and animal welfare projects. The result has significantly increased our visibility and given us a polished, professional image that truly reflects our work.
We also want to highlight their outstanding training on effective Social Media communication, which has been especially transformative for our social media presence and visibility.
Virginia Ruguru, Team Lead, Torch Initiatives
Collabs
Creative Support for New Initiatives
In 2025, we increased our support for Kickstarting For Good (K4G), the world's first incubator program designed for nonprofit organizations and impact initiatives working to transform the food system. At the end of 2025, we provided expert support to six graduate teams from the 2025 cohort and mentored initiatives on their impact strategy while consulting them on the movement's needs and landscape.
Our Communications & Brand Strategy Director, Chloë, led a naming webinar for the cohort and consulted organizations on their naming and brands in-person in Berlin during their Summit.
We're continuing to increase our support to KG4 graduates in 2026 and are excited to learn about the initiatives in the next cohort.
Uplifting Superstar Orgs in the Global South
We also partnered with global grantmaker Thrive Philanthropy to better support organizations driving food systems change in Africa. Our goal is to strengthen high-impact organizations working on the ground, helping them increase visibility and attract new supporters.
In 2025, our support included rewriting website copy, getting organizations set up on Squarespace, and teaching them how to edit their own sites. We also created brands that reflect the heart of their work, driven by the organizations themselves, with us there to support, not to impose our own perspective.
We're excited to continue this support into 2026 and uplift organizations doing critical work across Africa.
Document Design for Strategic Planning for Animal Activism
We continued our partnership with Strategic Planning for Animal Activism (SPAA), offering graduates document designs that shape their strategic work into beautiful and trust-inspiring documents they're proud to share with new donors.
Service Updates
Exploring What Organizations Need Most
This year we worked to explore what our clients need and which additional services they’d benefit from the most. We listened to where our clients were getting stuck and what gaps in our services were creating challenges. We decided to introduce two new services – website copywriting and naming.
Both services proved incredibly valuable in 2025, and the demand confirmed what we suspected: organizations need this support. We're expanding both offerings in 2026.
Website Copywriting & SEO
At the beginning of our website process, we’ve asked organizations to provide updated copy that reflects their current work. This had consistently become one of the biggest bottlenecks to launching a website at the end of the quarter.
Developing compelling website copy often fell outside an organization's expertise or capacity, and teams struggled to find the time while focusing on their mission work.
By introducing a dedicated website copywriting service, we handle this before the design phase even begins.
This streamlines our process and relieves organizations of that stress so they can focus on what they do best. Having a communications professional craft the copy also means the organization's mission comes through stronger and captures attention in ways that complement our design work.
We also expanded our expertise in SEO and AIO, integrating this highly-requested service into our copywriting offering.
Naming Service
Organizations frequently asked us about naming, which pairs naturally with our branding work. A name can shape how an organization is perceived and remembered, making it one of the most important decisions a group can make. Yet the naming process is often overwhelming, with teams generating long lists of options and feeling uncertain about which direction aligns with their strategic goals.
We introduced a dedicated naming service to guide organizations through this process.
Our approach helps refine options, align names with organizational strategy, and ease the anxiety that often comes with such a significant decision.
Whether helping teams narrow down a mishmash of terms to find clarity or encouraging them to take strategic risks that pay off, having an expert navigate the creative and strategic challenges of naming has proven invaluable, as the right name sets the foundation for the entire brand identity that follows. Many clients cite the naming process as a way to uncover misalignments in their broader strategy and how they appeal to key audiences.
Addressing those gaps through naming and brand strategy exercises helps bring everything into alignment and maximizes the value of the work.
Conferences
AVA Summit LA
We were grateful to connect with so many advocates at the conference and learn about the critical work they're doing for animals. Compared to the 2024 AVA Summit, we noticed that Violet's brand had become more recognized in the movement, and we found ourselves doing far fewer introductions than we expected for such a young organization. It was heartwarming to receive unexpected mentions during talks, including sessions where our team members weren't even present. These moments reminded us that collaboration amplifies what any of us can achieve alone!
Our applications were open during the conference and we were able to meet folks in person who later applied for our services. We loved reconnecting with past clients, learning from others, and building new relationships along the way.
Read our sister org's blog to learn more about our takeaways from the summit: 3 Things That Shifted Our Advocacy Mindset: AVA 2025
K4G 2025 Berlin
Our Communications & Brand Strategy Director Chloë Cudaback led a naming workshop for the K4G cohort and consulted with organizations on their brands in person in Berlin. She worked closely with initiatives navigating the naming process, helping them refine their options and align their names with their strategic goals. Organizations like Food Forward Europe and Who Let the Docs Out benefited from her guidance in clarifying their vision and taking strategic risks that shaped their entire brand identity
Chloë also conducted in-person Discovery sessions that laid the groundwork for ongoing projects, provided feedback on pitch decks to help organizations communicate their work more effectively, and offered strategic guidance on brand expression and website strategy. The in-person format allowed us to gather deeper insights into each organization's needs and strengthened our working relationships – now the foundation of this multi-phase, multi-quarter collaboration.
Thank You!
Thanks so much to everyone who's supported Violet and trusted us with your brands.
In 2025, we delivered the same value of creative services to the movement as in 2024, all at no cost to organizations. Our new intake process helped us manage requests more effectively, though the demand for creative support across the movement remained high.
On behalf of Violet, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported or worked with us along the way. If you used our services and helped us learn about your missions, helped us grow with each challenge you brought to us, or you've been following and supporting our work, we're incredibly grateful to all of you.
For 2026, our goal is clear: grow our capacity to support more organizations while also prioritizing rest and sustainability. We need to focus on working in a way that we can sustain for the long haul.
To do this, we're expanding our volunteer team and growing the number of movement-informed creative professionals at Violet. This means more mission-aligned creatives can support organizations doing vital work for animals.
At the same time, we'll keep doing what we do best: delivering high-quality creative services for free to organizations like yours, helping amplify the work that's changing hearts, minds, and systems for animals around the world.
Kate Rodman, on behalf of the Violet team
None of this would be possible without incredible people like you.
It is people like you, who believe that high-quality design services should be accessible to everyone advocating for a better future for animals, who make this a reality. Help shine a light on the work of advocates, limited by small budgets or short-staffed teams, and ensure that their designs reflect their missions in 2025.