Athletes for Justice
Overview
Athletes for Justice is a non-profit organization founded by professional athletes seeking to amplify the strength and resilience of under-resourced communities across the country. It was founded in 2018 by Sam Acho, Trey Burton, Chase Daniel, Akiem Hicks, and Mitch Trubisky.
Athletes for Justice had no brand or website, and a tight deadline of just a couple of weeks to get a site launched for a donation campaign that needed to go live.
Speaking with the Athletes for Justice team over the course of several days via discovery sessions, I was able to gather valuable feedback: "We want to be taken seriously." "We follow through.”
Role
I had the pleasure of serving as the lead designer of Athletes for Justice and learning about their cause. Speaking with their members and their founder, Sam Acho, was truly inspiring.
Understanding how they wanted to communicate their mission, I developed a brand new identity and website for their organization.
Activities and Deliverables
Discovery
Logo
Style Guide
User Interface Designs
Content Population
Website
Logo
Different directions were explored for the logo, but ultimately, there was a version that shined the most.
Fighting structural inequalities is at the heart of what Athletes for Justices does. Thus, it is visually interwoven into the logo mark. It is clear and strong in its stance. Its name is set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Bold, a font that is both sturdy and friendly in its build.
Colors
Colors were carefully picked to ensure respectable and friendly representation within the brand.
Typography
For typography, I selected the font "Poppins" because of the resemblance it has to the logo's word mark. This font is open source and is accessible for the Athletes for Justice team to use for brand materials.
Content Recommendations
I also did content population and style setup for their website, providing a foundation that their volunteers could continue to develop.
Brand in Action
To help further bring the brand to life, I provided examples of how the brand could be implemented in different types of materials.
Results
The Athletes for Justice team had an aggressive turnaround for the brand and website since they needed to launch before their Sky Takes Action campaign went live. I was able to get their site ready up and running in just a couple of weeks, and their campaign raised over $20,000.
Design Discovery
To help inform the brand and design direction. I conducted a series of activities with the Athletes for Justice team.
Semantic Profile
In this exercise, I had team members place votes and position the brand based on a set of contrasting metrics. I presented three collections of metrics. These collections were focused on brand experience, voice and tone, and visual aesthetic.
Content Analysis
To help provide guidance on the content population for their new site, another UX team member and I led an exercise in which the Athletes for Justice team was tasked to identify important messaging and calls-to-action on a collection of low-fidelity screens from non-profit sites. This provided the team with references on what sites were more impactful in communicating the mission and purpose of their organizations.
Site Design Survey
Leveraging outcomes for the semantic profile activity, I had team members rate and describe sites within their competitive landscape using metrics from the semantic profile exercise. This helped provide tangible associations with experiences that resonated with their brand.
Logo Exercise
Based on outcomes from the semantic profile exercise, I had the Athletes for Justice team review and discuss a collection of logos within the non-profit space. We covered what and why certain logos did or didn’t align with how they wanted to be perceived. This helped narrow down visual direction when addressing the logo.