Working for a company in the midst of a branding overhaul has been a very interesting experience, one that’s teaching me a lot about the inner workings of things on a professional level. We’ve all seen many rebrands that work, maturing visuals with a more sophisticated, on-trend logo and materials to follow (like Apple or Google). We’ve also seen the unfortunate cases where an attempt to be relevant works against the brand’s image (like Gap). I was a bit excited as well as nervous to be a part of a design team in the middle of a rebrand — my work would have to match the changes being made but also keep the feeling that people associated with generationOn were used to and sometimes, there isn’t always a clear instruction on how to do that.

One of the things I learned while watching this maturing of design and working with the marketing & communications team was that you really have to design for your audience. Of course, I already knew that designs were made keeping in mind the customer or participants’ response to the call to action, but this was a new level of understanding. genOn is a non-profit that strives to engage youth in service so their original branding was very youth-minded with chalkboard doodles and multiple bright colors. When they did a survey of the people who most frequently visit their website and the people with which they directly work with however, they realized that they were designing for the wrong audience. The majority of people ever seeing the genOn branding were adult women (mainly mothers, teachers & other school administration, volunteer directors, etc.). After receiving this information, the staff realized that they needed to scale back the juvenile elements in the design and use elements more appealing to their actual target. That meant incorporating more purple, one of their secondary brand colors, and trading hand-written chalkboard fonts for sleeker sans-serif type.

This is something I think will really help me in the future: the knowledge that even though a product/service is for a specific audience, the brand itself might not always target the same audience, it might even have two audiences. An example of this is children’s programming and subsequently, the toys, apparel, and virtually anything else that is linked to a character or movie/show. Though the kids fall for the easily recognizable characters plastered on every item possible, the parents are the ones with the money and the ones who will let their children watch, wear, use, and/or play with these characters. I noticed this a lot while shopping for a newborn gift in Babies R Us recently. Babies, or more specifically toddlers, obviously can’t read nor understand the packaging that their clothes, accessories, and toys come in but they’re drawn to the familiar cartoon faces. The design of these packages is usually very clean, airy, and bright and very appealing to the people who’d most likely be in Babies R Us — mothers and other female family members.

Like I said, I was a bit scared that my work wouldn’t get across the same ideas in a new way but my supervisor has been nothing but supportive and keeps reassuring me that the designs I’ve been creating for the brand are in fact helping their plan to mature!