2020 Winner
2020 Winners
IDEO.org
The Design Vanguard Identity
Sid Lee's mandate was to reimagine the Design Vanguard’s brand identity before its 2019 conference at the Eames Ranch in California.
The Design Vanguard is a philanthropic community of business, tech, and social leaders committed to designing a more just and aesthetically pleasing world. It was founded in the spirit of Charles and Ray Eames, the renowned husband-and-wife design team that made considerable contributions to American modernist design. Non-profit organization IDEO.org helped establish the Design Vanguard and continues to organize its events.
The Design Vanguard wants to further the Eames's democratic design practices, aiming to harness the growing power and influence of designers to create a more inclusive future.
The agency's task was to create a visual identity and language system for the Design Vanguard. The project’s scale included brand guidelines along with branded expressions for their conference. In 2020, we were tasked with repurposing the website and adding a directory component to help the Design Vanguard gather and share the design projects created to tackle the COVID-19 crisis.
Insights and Strategy
The creative angle for the Design Vanguard had to resonate with current, influential designers while paying homage to the Eames's modernist designs. We also needed to recognize the business executives and tech innovators the Vanguard appeals to.
These leaders are experts in seeing insights. If the shop wanted them to engage with the Vanguard's goal of impacting the world through powerful design, an aesthetically powerful language was required.
Because the Vanguard's objectives include design inclusivity and holding designers to higher ethical standards, we took a progressive approach to creative concepts.
Ideas needed to be compelling enough to spark dialogue while spurring designers to develop solutions. Executions also had to be understood by the global design community, reflect its diversity, and further discussions around aesthetics and social inclusion.
Execution
For the visual language, Sid Lee replaced select letters with iconography inspired by midcentury modernism. The shapes showcased abstraction and specificity, which reconnected to the meaning of each word.
Referencing Powers of Ten by the Eames – a film about scale and movement to help us see problems differently – we used macro- and microphotography to explore varied perspectives, tackling subjects from unexpected angles.
Designs by the Eames inspired our bright and joyful colour palette. In a nod to punkrock concert posters, iconography and texts were printed in black over pastel, neutral, or colour backgrounds. Also inspired by counterculture, the bold and capitalized Girott headline typeface provided an irreverent, playful, and rebellious tone.
The Clarendon Graphic body copy typeface – once used throughout the Eames’s work – complemented headlines with touches of warmth and charm. The modular logo included six variations, furthering the Design Vanguard’s mission of multiple perspectives.
Results and Impact
The Design Vanguard has lofty altruistic goals. The agency's mandate was to communicate its mission and personality to the leading business, tech, and culture designers in attendance. Executions of the brand guidelines and visual expressions helped create a dialogue about how designers now have the power and responsibility to design a better world.
They also complemented the Eames Ranch conference, opening spaces for participants to feel inspired to speak about issues and potential solutions.
To measure the impact, the agency took anonymous quotes from those in attendance.
“Wow guys. Few gatherings I've been to have felt as important as this week's Design Vanguard. Truly you've created a space to crack wide open the challenging, complicated, messy conversations that most need unleashing in our industry.”
“Thank you for bringing the beauty and magic and showing what great craft looks like.”
Creativity and Craft
The Design Vanguard is a community of designers that exists to push the limits of what it means to design for humanity. The identity Sid Lee created had to be sophisticated enough to speak to these designers and inspire them to create with the highest standards in mind. The strong personality it created for the brand also had to make room for all the ideas and projects to be shared in the website directory. The flexibility of the brand tools allowed the integration of a multitude of different visuals coming from different sources to be put forward without ever losing the specific brand personality of the Design Vanguard.